Where the Air Turns to Glass

The Great Arc of Stone in the indigo height,
Where the sun-fire dies in the marrow of night,
The Himalayas, in their white, sepulchral sleep,
Guard what the centuries buried beneath the deep.

And Love is the shadow that walks on the crest,
A pilgrim of longing, by cold winds possessed;
It leaves the green valley, the warmth of the plain,
And follows the snowline through silence and pain.

Like a glacier descending through cathedral stone,
Slow rivers of ice through the mountains alone,
It grinds at the granite, it whitens the bone,
Till valleys remember what peaks have outgrown.

A vow made at twilight, a footprint in snow,
A word lost to wind where the high rivers flow;
And though every promise be broken and gone,
Something beneath it keeps burning till dawn.

For high on the ridges, where the air turns to glass,
A lifetime is nothing; the centuries pass.
The mountain, the lover, the silence, the stone—
Are one in the music the ages have known.