Not really mountains but high hills, though no less prepossessing to someone from the level land of prairie where distance and destination

are horizontal and one proceeds without giving much thought to simply placing one foot in front of another.  Here again and again progress is to come to cross purposes, the going around something that doesn't want

you there.  Far below is a fault line where two contentions of creation have riven and risen into these steep slopes of granite and first forest, half-buried boulders ice-age old left behind in the ancient flow melt, lifted up into foundations and capstones, past and present.

                                  a thousand years

                                  following the footsteps

                                  in my blood  

A path so old, so barely there, that I can easily believe the last feet to follow it were the moccasins of one of my ancestors, stalking a deer up to the promontory or seeking the spring-source of the stream that makes its own way, first deeper into its decline  and then slowing and settling in a clearing, a pool in a cup of stone, staying and going on again. 

                                hearing the old stories

                                the telling in their old language

                                wind in oaks and pines