Tim Lilburn the trained Jesuit seal has for years etc.

The mountain’s take-no-prisoners hump,

seen from the second-floor window

of the X-ray clinic, over late-day traffic,

sickens me, a lightness that goes all

the way in.

Just above traffic, gravelly air,

                                  a sluggish creek.

These dismemberments, which, it is

said, are leaves falling, the wind shifting.

The mountain puts strangeness sickness on me

untranslatable to prednisone.

Here its 9,000-year-old name

in SENĆOŦEN I have in a tight winding of light,

the hard tip of our relations. Day by day

I look at the mountain and walk and groom it (tearing out

ivy and Scotch broom) and think in a small, single-occupant

craft toward the middle of its galactic mass

where I believe the will to sit across a minute cocktail table

from me in a film from the early 1940s

and receive looks from me through its drinking face

exists, cleaning its paws.

I would bitch at it and deliciously

gossip and cook up schemes.

This morning I considered the hideous gravity –

swift black timing chain in necessity’s

machine churning through objects’ teeth – was the real visage

of the beautiful friend.

Yes, but how then breathe?