Mountaintop

In a thicket of evergreens, a flock of ravens in silence surveys blue fog unfurled from a mountaintop not yet blown asunder. In the white pine that towers over the haven

of this quiet shrine to a plundered world, the oil-black birds refrain from their coal-dark hymn, sentinels of scrub grass, milkweed, and wild wheat, . of rhododendron, sumac, and summer heat.

No oil or coal amass beneath this terrain . like gold beneath abandoned temple vaults. The ravens watch over ordinary ochre clay and driftwood silvered by the wind and rain.