What I Owe the Fading Day
          The rockface of mountains dreaming Robert Hass
by KB Ballentine

A tangle of pine waves from the rockface,
other leaves still lost, moldering in crevices
as winter abandons us. A skink hurtles
into a hollow, tugging a beetle’s carapace
while a white sky crushes the horizon, spoils
the view with its blank weight.
Dreaming, the mountain, tinted with glacier lilies
and flowering currants, cools as twilight turns
gray, sighs into moonlight.

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