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"Through the Black Ranges" by Ava Leavell Haymon

spring 2003 vol. 55, no. 2

They are just alike, there are too many.
We have walked through them for days.

When we look south, a thousand fall away
toward the Ganges. North, they range between us
and the great ones, the unwatching
snow peaks that keep their distance.

Young mountains, the dark raw color of dirt,
the pointed shapes a child makes, hourglassing
sandy grit through her curled hand, called
inside before she has time to pat it into mounds.

Too steep for villages, bleak even to the woodcutter,
the elms and hemlocks scarce enough anywhere.
Terraces fallen away to scattered chir pine, scrub,
spiky sedge beginning to thin into tundra.

Traced along one side of the sandbox pyramid
by the thinnest finger, a ledge trail twists
in and out, up, down, follows every fold and ruffle.
At last, we stop moving—and now the mountains

lumber past us at the dogged pace of our own walk,
one day’s small progress at a time. In the evening,
they grow still, so we lie down and sleep.
Each time, we are a little higher.

Ava Leavell Haymon writes poems and plays. She teaches poetry writing in Louisiana and, during the summer months, directs the writers and artists center, Guadalupe Mesa Studies, in New Mexico. Her poems have been published in literary journals, including Poetry, The Hudson Review, and The Southern Review, and in five chapbooks, most recently Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow (March Street Press). Two of her collections are forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press, The Strict Economy of Fire and Choosing Monogamy.