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.