I.
Part of my voice died with you—halted, thin,
abrupt as aspens cut at timberline,
where snow keeps working talus down to stone,
stripping the ridge to bone by frost and brine.
I’ll never see your brooding eyes again,
nor hear that timbre when I bend to drink
and take the brook’s cold mouth in a tin canteen
beneath the blunt insistence of the wind.
You’ve become enjambment—memory’s ridge,
mountain and scar, past lovers set like signs:
blue columbine and monkshood at the edge,
some doubling back where judgment breaks its lines.
The trail repeats, then fails, then disappears;
the line gives way beneath accumulated years.

II.
We ate raw rhubarb high on Bristolhead,
panned pyrite out of Gunnison’s cold run,
took quartz and petrified wood, long dead,
from scabbed-out peaks that blistered in the sun.
I was too young to know your Buddha calm,
to know you pitied him, not favored him;
your cocked eyebrow I took for ease or charm,
not skepticism honed and sharpened grim.
Still, anguish moved behind your steady gaze—
those brown eyes held what ghosts refuse to flee.
We burned inside that house in early days;
I mourned you then, though blind to what must be.
Grief came before the words to fix its name;
the house went down, the heat in us the same.

III.
You bore your scars like maps the body keeps,
learned without words, folded under skin,
until the fire took flesh in ordered sweeps
and left the rest for ritual to begin.
Your ashes wait beside a conqueror’s cairn,
a folded flag, my window’s narrow ledge,
to cross Mt. Holy Cross, be overthrown
into the Great Divide, past brink and edge.
We burned in that house—all of us—and still
you carried fire farther than the rest.
Snow works the talus down against its will;
the ridge accepts what will not be confessed.
No voice survives intact what must be given;
the offering lifts and thins itself to heaven.

I.
In nineteen-ten they woke to thunderlight
at Windy Mountain. Snow sheared from its shelf,
fell like a body from a great height,
took Bailets Hotel, took the track itself,
took cars and men and mailbags in its run
and drove them through the dark into the trees.
The Spokane Express was torn apart, undone.
The sun rose on a valley filled with wrecked degrees
of iron: boilers split, pistons bent,
sandpipes cinched tight around the standing pines.
They counted ninety-six dead from the rent
of snow and steel, laid them along the lines,
and sent them down on sleds. The mountain held
the rest; the river held what bled and cooled.

II.
Two lawyers jumped from Twenty-Five and lived.
They slid the switchbacks under Cascade Tunnel,
came down end over end and rose half-given
to breathe again. Below them lay the funnel
of dark and quiet—Jesseph, Merritt, snow
packed in their cuffs. A whiskey flask went round,
the proof passed hand to hand. Yet just below,
they found Ms. Starret pinned where branches wound
her to the wreck. Her infant lay beneath
her breast, the crying gone. Another son
they cut free living, blood along his teeth,
a stick drawn from his head. The work was done
by lanternlight. The snow came down anew
and covered what the night let through.

III.
You brought me here among the dead,
among the names fixed at the rim—
a nurse, a child, a writer gone to bed.
You knew what weight I’d carry in.
The wire burns between my hands, above
the cliff where alder closes over ruin.
What did you want? I bring you nothing of
the relic kind—no leaf from Bhutan,
no cuspid from Siddhartha’s mouth, nor canine
splinters lifted from the rood of Calvary—
I only cede the ice-tipped thorns of Whitebark pine,
the ash of our own catastrophes
shook from the severed veil
and scattered along the Iron Goat Trail.

A cross-dissolve might be construed
as too sentimental for a seasoned eye
in a non-antiquarian such as you.
Which is to say, you would decide
to show the portrait of the young aesthete
enjambed against an ailing patriarch,
like Kubrick’s up-cranked primate
hurling his bone in a heavenly arc
cutting to an indolent craft in focus,
marking epochs in between
the static grace of Discobolus
anticipating still this box of dreams
and a thousand statues flickering in the dark.
That would be you. You’d drive the reel ahead
past creaking scenes, past dialogue and arc,
past diegesis heavy with the dead,
past hemlock, ailing masters, acolytes conjoined,
and say: Just cut to the fucking point.