Time of Mountains

Colorado Poet Laureate Thomas Hornsby Ferril

Time of Mountains

So long ago my father led me to 

The dark impounded orders of this canyon, 

I have confused these rocks and waters with 

My life, but not unclearly, for I know 

What will be here when I am here no more.

I've moved in the terrible cries of the prisoned water, 

And prodigious stillness where the water folds 

Its terrible muscles over and under each other.

When you've walked a long time on the floor of a river, 

And up the steps and into the different rooms, 

You know where the hills are going, you can feel them, 

The far blue hills dissolving in luminous water,

The solvent mountains going home to the oceans. 

Even when the river is low and clear, 

And the waters are going to sleep in the upper swales, 

You can feel the particles of the shining mountains 

Moping against your ankles toward the sea.

Forever the mountains are coming down and I stalk 

Against them, cutting the channel with my shins, 

With the lurch of the stiff spray cracking over my thighs; 

I feel the bones of my back bracing my body,

And I push uphill behind the vertebrate fish 

That lie uphill with their bony brains uphill 

Meeting and splitting the mountains coming down.

I push uphill behind the vertebrate fish 

That scurry uphill, ages ahead of me. 

I stop to rest but the order still keeps moving: 

I mark how long it takes an aspen leaf 

To float in sight, pass me, and go downstream; 

I watch a willow dipping and springing back 

Like something that must be a water-clock, 

Measuring mine against the end of mountains.

But if I go before these mountains go, 

I'm unbewildered by the time of mountains, 

I, who have followed life up from the sea 

Into a black incision in this planet, 

Can bring an end to stone infinitives. 

I have held rivers to my eyes like lenses 

And rearranged the mountains at my pleasure, 

As one might change the apples in a bowl, 

And I have walked a dim unearthly prairie 

From which these peaks have not yet blown away.

Thomas Hornsby Ferril was born in Denver, where he remained a resident until his death in 1988. An award-winning poet, essayist, columnist, and coeditor with his wife of The Rocky Mountain Herald from 1939–1972, Ferril was appointed Colorado Poet Laureate in 1979.