A Poem for the 150th Anniversary of Robert Frost’s Birth: ‘Imagine Mountains’ by Carey Jobe

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Imagine Mountains

For the Sesquicentennial of Robert Frost’s birth
(March 26, 1874 – March 26, 2024)

“Let chaos storm!
Let cloud shapes swarm!
I wait for form.”  —Robert Frost, “Pertinax”

Imagine a mountain’s patient peaks
revert to wave-rinsed shoals of sand,
that limestone’s undulating streaks
or slate stairs crumbling on cliffsides
deposit damply in your hand
a drifting crinoid’s feathered strand
still smelling of Silurian tides.

Then, like a plate, the seashore cracks.
You vanish, and your sandy tracks
subsume in metamorphic birth
as an irrupting spine of earth
rumples bright sea, tarp-taut terrain,
like bargain carpets tossed in drifts;
tectonic shields collide and strain
like thudding wrestlers; throated rifts
widen; red magma rivers slide
in dragon-coils; cake-layered bedrock
uprears, then the tsunami tide
halts mid-air to abruptly lock
in crustal, chill, mesmeric glaze
a lofty mountain’s quiet gaze.

Five fingers then mold stone like clay:
one finger is the knifing stream
that rinses bone-gray silts away,
filtering to a pebbled gleam
through leaf-weirs fine as tangled hair;
another, summer storms that tear
rock-clinging trees with banshee yowl,
upturning roots with crash of wood,
a gaping crater where they stood;
or winter’s milky fog that soaks
the cliff’s brow like a soggy towel,
freezing by starlight to ice-wedge
loose boulders off a giddy ledge
that bounce downslope like hammer strokes;
or tendril threads that stitch and wind
a garment woven underground
along, between, against, around
whatever cracks or clefts they find,
grubbing like moles through earthen belts;
or when in March a snowbank melts—
first steam, then trickles, then a flood.
Avalanche-quick, whole hillsides go
in batter-thick, congealing mud
while buried streams, stalactite-slow,
trace hidden caves—then sinkholes slump
where rain stews in a boiler sump
black kettles of nutritious ink
that hickory, white oak, poplar drink,
a heady bubbling leafy brew
that cures the vapors—rousing, you
observe green pastureland where soon
farmhouses rise and cattle graze,
traversing lives of little change
from daybreak sun to midnight moon
under a mountain’s quiet gaze.

Imagine a patient mountain range.
Beclouded by a churning might
that shapes our coarsened breadth and height
avalanche-quick, stalactite-slow,
eyes search too vaguely to perceive
the truths we feel but cannot know.
Mountains teach us to believe.

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Crinoids: passive suspension feeders who filter plankton from sea water through feathery arms and are documented in the fossil record as early as 480 million years ago.

The Silurian Era (443.7 to 416 million years ago): a period during which Earth underwent widespread geologic changes that had considerable impact on the environment and life.

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Carey Jobe is a retired attorney.  In addition to the Society of Classical Poets, his poems have recently appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken, and The Chained Muse.  He lives and writes near Tallahassee, Florida.