As Mountains Wait

If I could wait, as long as mountains wait:
purple sawtooth waves in stone tsunami
that break on the horizon, ten million
years spent cresting on a tide, with boulders
frothing down their slopes and the moon tiring
of the constant drag: then the sea would come
to me, my feet no longer dry as rock.

But the hour is late. Dirty dinner plate
of sun scrapes scraps of light in the balmy
bin of night. No orison for bison
dead beneath the plains, whose hide clothes shoulders
leathern as my hopes. One eagle gyring:
a feathered nag, wings beating on war drum
clouds: its cry a plea to unwind the clock.