Chronicling Consciousness From the Bottom of Green Mountain

I sit on a white bench wondering

could I see this mountain if the grass didn’t move? Without motion, I am blind (I ask why of movement and receive stillness in reply, perceiving my voice to hold no echo.)

and my glass eyes fill the holes in my mind like bookends—except they’re not, because that would mean that the thing between held meaning, millions of inestimable words pressed into a cultured jacket, bound to a moment’s whim.

Not ends, then; openings, wide to the discernment that I am out there, that my pages expand past sight and motion.

Summit who swallows the stars, taste the umbrellaed blue spiced with starlight, stirred by sunlight, seen and understood (I ask who of the unfettered sky, who painted you to have such a spirit of a kind that lives enmeshed in me?)

And though I stare at my inside-self chained to static blindness I think I could see that mountain

Even if the meadowlark abandoned her post and the mountain lion fled, even if the wind ceased to nudge the sward to dance with the evening primrose, even if the lightning’s voice failed to rattle dust atop the grassroots and the downpour’s humor caved amongst the agelast scrubs.

I think I could see that mountain.

But what of the restless eyes that yearn to see and understand, to meet the gaze of starlit gems, witness those visions of sunlight,

still their reckless energy and stare stare at the mountain finally promising the dearth a catalyst for its shadow? (I ask how of the hollowness, how do I reconnect

with what awaits me at the bottom of the apple-picking tree, to hear the sough of the orchard, and the reflection of human voices

to catch a whisper by its name, lift a mutter up from its feet and send it waltzing?)

Without motion, I am blind. But what of the movement that pulses in the unseen, the unfelt, the unworried? What of the voice that carries on a conversation, echoes in the hollow questions, gathers in loneliness’ resound?

At the end of it all, when color becomes a mind’s dream and stillness is a lie, could I decide to recline on this bench and throw myself onto that mountaintop?