Friendship your voice calling out my name is the only beam of light guiding you  uphill on the darkening mountain while i search for your silhouette in the labyrinthine streets below quietly   

Entering the Mountain 

It takes barely fifteen minutes,  lugging my blue morning shadow  up the concrete path which masons take, past the piled up homestays, past the bleating lambs and the shepherd with his radio in the winter sun, to get to the threshold of the stream’s greeting— it greets whoever walks through the door. And suddenly, I’ve lost what I no longer need. To be washed clean of a name and then go looking for it is fear. It is neither in the dappled shade nor in the blue between the pines, pierced  by the pincushion sun. Stop, pay attention  to the colours on the redstart’s flicking tail. Alone on that boulder, its single high-pitched note rising above the stream’s continuous static even when you’re gone, scrambling up gravel and loose soil on the other side. Only when you return in the evening, the wide flanks of the mountain open and you hear it beating inside your ribcage like a bird, fierce and sleepless, come to roost there.