One winds through firs—their weeds are ferns
A brown four feet—to aspens four feet through;
Woodpeckers hammer at the pine-cones, upside-down
The burros wander through the forest with their bells,
And the deer trample the last stalky meadow.
But the plants evolve into a rock, the precipice
Habitual, in Chinese ink, to such a scene;
Persisting in a cleft, one streaming fir
Shelters at its root a fat philosopher
Reducing into silence this grey upper world.
But he is missing-dead perhaps, perhaps a prisoner.
Cold, airy, silent, the half-sunken floes
Stream south from the mountain-top: the seven ranges
Below are the fields, the dim fields; and the fighter
Turning to them with its thin spectral whine;
Below the moss tracks, rock to rock, the fall of water
The mote dances in a Nature full of squirrels.
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