Look-back Imagination

Here is another one of my daily poems that I think turned out pretty well. Again, it needs lots of work, I'm sure, but I'm posting it now anyway. I thought of this poem while sitting outside near a dirt road with imprinted mud tracks from some car and I began to think about what it might have looked like before people, and then I decided to keep on going back in time. And then I decided to make it a mountain and I decided a lot of other stuff too that didn't actually happen, but I had fun with the images at least. Hope you enjoy it too!

Pilot Mountain

Before chiseled rubber left streaks on this concrete road,

before concrete, hot and sticky like a summer day,

before pounds of fleshy feet pressed down this neck

of the woods into a dirt-worn deep-tracked trail,

before mud stuck between the toes and walked with me

down the mountain to my home carved from stone,

before the rocks grew like trees into boulders and waves

of gray, crashing into crags to make this mountain,

before any gathering of continents or contentious oceans,

back when the chunks of the earth, its salt, its gravel,

its blood and soul lay scattered in this black corner of space,

what hands of light built this ball we live on, brooding

over the deepness, pulling out water, intelligence, and order?

Before I looked back on this traveler’s way, so perfect now,

before I’d peered into the valley’s distance and observed

a family of birds create nests from twigs, I understood nothing.