“No destination except toward mountains” – Joan Muzza

Covered with eucalyptus, shaggy red hair, silvered blue-green

sword-shaped leaves, tonic oil on my fingers and I am back

among the mountains that ringed my growing-up years,

going up stairs that stretched from elementary to high school,

every day out of breath by the time I’d reached the top, stopped

to look down on the city on a savanna, mountains across the way,

mountains all around. I breathed better in their thin air, where fires

burnt dark orange and breathing was a conscious gesture, each breath

taking in meaning of a language different from the one spoken

at home, different from the one spoken at heart, spoken in dreams,

heard now in waking wishing for a destination of mountains,

nothing for it but to climb, to climb and keep on climbing,

keep on reaching back in time for the comfort

of rough-barked trees, pungent leaves, deep

surrounding steepness, sloping

downward, slipping down.