"This craggy hill is a hard place in winter".

So I began a poem once, and it was true

Until it wasn't.  "Rocks sharpened the wind

Like a whetstone" set it teetering, and then

Something about the "sepulchral silence,

Like being alone in an old stone church"

And suddenly the whole thing collapsed.

Buried but not unremembered it seems,

Climbing this hill that's not really craggy

But hard in the way sunlight is piercing

The pines and a few oaks, the darting

Sharp angularities of shrill tree sparrows,

How the heat shimmers the fern fronds

And dust hanging heavy in the still air.

How different it is at night when moonlight

Sifts slowly through the trees, rounding

All the edges in a luminous coalescence,

The air cool and clear, a deepening quiet.

Not a stone church but mountain temple;

Now the chanted meditations of crickets,

The inscrutable Buddha-owl, soft and serene.