It is difficult to love mountains.

You smooth out a cloth onto the table,

your age weighs out the heaviness of your breath in cold stones,

folds of material drift in waves to reach and drape my thighs,

you wonder why it does not rain -

the garden, you sigh.

You offer me cucumber, pass the buttered bread and cheese,

we talk in the trickles of the movement of a brook,

though even wordless, you are comfort.

This memory is so distant now that it has the properties of a fantasy,

how you transported me to the devotion of clean water 

for a short time,

and for that short time you are the respite

that shows me the refuges of the choirs of hedgerows,

the names and qualities of their congregations of lane side flowers.

You teach me garlands of bladderwrack and seashells,

you hand me my imagination 

tucked into a mermaid's purse,

where a young skate is nursed to be thrust back 

into the vastness of an ocean. 

You give me a book of the birds and butterflies of Britain;

and I still reach for the gleam of its blue sky hardcover

as all these sanctuaries you offered me 

in the white noise of the static charge of my hypervigilance.

I tell you I do not often have dreams

as if my sleeping mind will not speak,

I have only dreamt of my nakedness, 

the vulnerability of my pink capsule of flesh

and the cut and bite of wind and rock -

it must be that life is all climbs of harsh places,

and you confide that it can be difficult to love some mountains.

Image from pixabay.