Clouds

As the wind, sly-fingered, plucked at the hemlocks they

shivered, gently, shedding fine showers of snow

from their gloved hands. Beneath them, something

cracked like snapped twig or sudden sneeze between branches. 

I looked, expecting flash of squirrel or flit of bird 

but saw only icy spray, quickly gone.

The day, cold as sea water, hung heavy  

over ridge and trail. Clouds draped in damp 

blankets, shrugging wide woolly wrinkles over

deep drifts. We wandered, dogs and I, pushing 

through white crests and gray curtains. I wanted us 

mist-frosted, dreamy and glistening

but these clouds, like smoke, were too dry and wind-whipped

for whimsical cloaks or vigorous tides.

We knew fog and snow only, a tunneled trudge forward

on well-packed trail, and I forgot how the valley yawns 

nearby, forgot how the ridge lifts in sturdy arms behind us, forgot

how life would always rise again 

and again. But the wind, insistent, lifted the tireless 

shoulders of trees. It swept the clever blinds away until

the mountain, irrefutable, stood breathless and still

thinly veiled, an ocean in itself.

I, snapped by sunlight, watched the clouds ebb, a portal 

between shadow and light.