On This Mountain

Rainbow Reverse

'He will destroy the shroud
That enfolds all people.'

You were unattainable, near the very top,
I knew I followed, could never lead,
didn’t have your honed skills
to get myself alongside you.
Yet we both, briefly, made it.
Behind me in the snow now lie
all your mean-squeezed footprints,
your skin stuck to the rock-face,
our days of metallic winds, the cold
that tremored my skull to dance despair
down on my knife-grip mind.

All that yearning, release and regrasp
what it meant to stay alive,
no gap between doze and gone,
no tiny concentration lapses,
as I loomed in and out of purpose,
in and out like hurt breaths
while the mountain’s height created
yawns of climbing lows.

Mountains are all Sirens singing
to stop us sailing past,
who suck you up to throw you
down to the rocks below.
You loved this one beyond sense,
your elbows all outside corners
I couldn’t climb around,
my pitch open to interpretation,
for you I was never more than
an intermediate hold.

So I studied my way inside
your true love's bomb-proof face,
found her chimney, used the key
to push that wedge between you
my body-width wide.
I got to the top first before you
turned up hoary, splintered
my vision into ice-shards
as you stumbled down,
smaller with each step,
diminishing us away.

What I offer offends you -
the beta of my easy route,
my crampons of unasked for love
dug deep inside my rival's face.
Alone on this mountain top
that bible verse haunts me still,
more madly than the towering wind,
because its beacon of hope
shrunk with each little death
down to a rainbow reverse,
made it a false promise.

Our lives are absolute
only because of loss.