My bruises ripple like the permafrost atop the Sierra’s.  I’m eroding with eons.  I’ve become something barely traversable, a name you can wend through, a corpus of tectonic tissue.  Nestle your head between my snowcaps; I’m something people die finding their way through.  Watch as my cliffsides ache and ache and bloom.

I tell you that the Sierra’s are bruised and your eyes tell me you know how the sun cannot reach the summit through the freeze. When I am home will you grip my knuckles as the cold grips them? I want my flesh to raise in a topography of your lust.

How tall will Half Dome be when we are gone? When the earth has healed its lacerations and sutures itself from our mugging, would we recognize what is left? 

My knees are unsummited peaks with legs kicked raw and I say I love you with words reduced like balsamic into something thick and black. Drizzle me on greens that will never grow atop the Sierra’s. Let me make you pucker.

I am sleeping and I find you.  I dream your shoulder, a ledge for my chin, a shear to gaze down from.  I wake and feel all five hundred knots in my stomach at once.

My ears pop and there is no joy in the pain. There is no map for heartache at an altitude of six miles. My ears pop and nobody hears your beautiful name slip my lips. This cabin is full of stale breath scented with loneliness and icemelt. My ears pop and I am tired of the pressure.