If I trace the line of the mountains, it is likeness enough to the line that any mountains make. Likeness even to the hills out there, and the mounds of snow right here. It is a silhouette to count on, that I may be greater than or consumed by, that I see always and don’t need to understand. With just this line I see the mountain, much more so than when I touch it and climb it and look out over all the things I’m made to feel I know. Because I see these things, but do not know.

I climb, I breathe heavy and ascend something so unlike my own body and so much of the earth that even living upon it I cannot grasp it. Ascend until it is mine and becomes nothing. Here I become also unlike my own body and unlike earth, and I am far away and unlike anything I know and this is where I come to see the shapeless things that hover in on the air I breathe unthinkingly.

Like condensation, and the clarity of your fingernails, and the way hearing the piano feels like drawing the line that mountains make. And I wonder, if I hold that piece of silver paper against my chest in the sun will it show me something? If I think of his face long enough will I see it, will some medium come down like cold fog on the hills or a piece of paper and show me something beautiful that I cannot know because it isn’t here on the mountain, because I saw it yesterday and that is not enough…