Where are the saints, the stigmata, ecstatic tremors

and tongues of fire? This cup could never hold

all that water, and besides, it is glacial frozen

high in the cold lonely mountains.

Take my poem please, hold it in your hand

like a trembling chick fresh from the egg, breathing

the tiniest breaths you can imagine, breathing

suspenseful in the tremors

of such large things as there are at hand.

An existential implosion, there is nothing to hold

but a paradox under a mountain

of paradoxes, repeated in different words. A frozen

mammoth from a hundred thousand years ago, frozen

in a museum freezer, heavy breathing

paleontologists imagine steaks the size of mountains.

It is meat in so many ways, tremors

in stomachs that can only hold

themselves for so long before they start to eat the hand

that fed them absolutely nothing. Hand

them another piece of whatever, frozen

of course, with a that freezer burnt dry hold

on all the things that should have kept them breathing

and if you stop, and look to your right you will see tremors.

It is the moving of the earth that causes mountains.

It is the beauty of standing on a mountain

that causes me to wring my hands

over the fact that peace is only a lack of tremors

and one only exists frozen

in the other, like people breathing

in what trees breath out, it is thus that lovers hold

each other, lost, but with something to hold.

Lost in the beautiful mountains

that they fell into just after. Breathing

before sleep, forgetting as they slip away where the hand

in their hand came from as they are frozen

religiously in each others’ arms waiting for the tremors

to recede, holding out for a hand

to hold as they almost dream lucid mountains, sublime and frozen,

breathing softly and seeing at the last minute the root of the tremors.