Mountains (from Salt Lake City Airport)

From the sky
The Rocky Mountains make me
think of crumpled paper,
Wrinkled sheets on an unmade bed beneath a faded late morning sunshine,
Or sometimes the raw edges
Of scars on skin.
Mountains are the history of Earth's violence upon itself-
A territorial warfare waged within the earth's core,
Or the painful adolescence of a planet in process,
Or maybe the lovemaking of land itself;
The paths they trace across the continents are faint sketches
Of a time that only God and plankton can remember.
I think they are also reminders of human smallness:
There are still some places in the world
Where the walls and barriers that bind and separate us
were not built
by human hands.

I think it's funny how mountains vanish
If you get too close:
A vast wall of rock that towers over you
Like a stone skyline
From several miles away
Becomes simply a steep path sloppily lined by trees; or just
A next step up the rocky stair.
The only way you know you are moving
Is the weight in your legs,
and if you are high enough,
The raspy confusion of your lungs.

I once loved a man
Who was in love with the mountains;
He breathed better in the penthouses of the world,
on only the fumes of oxygen.
Perhaps he was immortal, a God,
Meant for the sky itself.
I lost him, I think, in a city
And in cellphones and in the silence that distance makes probable; but then
I wonder if he lost himself too.
I wonder if he has found himself again, and if he has found someone else to love his mountains-

And then I wonder
If we always pass on the things we love
To the people who love us,
Like yawns-
or head colds.
Or, in my case,
mountains.