Where the Path Ends  

The mountains stood at a distance.
Something in me answered.

The body moved
before the will named it.
A low, nameless insistence
took hold of the heart.

The paths refused coherence.
Mud yielded, stone resisted.
Thorns tore, without intention.
Still the summit returned
again and again
to the mind’s eye.

I walked.
I invented passage.
Ignorant of what waited
low in the grass,
coiled, watching.

The ascent narrowed.
No path now.
What was once marvellous
from afar
collapsed into mass,
stone against stone,
tree against tree.

Water spoke
without appearing.
Beasts cried
inside birdsong.
Wind threaded all sounds
into one unease.

I stopped.
Not to rest,
but to persuade myself.
Why fear
what once seemed whole?

My shadow lengthened beyond me.
Time tilted.
Evening gathered its weight.

Step.
Pause.
Breath held, then released.

The silence did not console.
It instructed.
A small voice, without sound,
said: further.

The image I carried
began to fail.
Another image replaced it.
Neither held.

The body slowed.
The distance thinned.
Night arrived
without ceremony.

Hands learned the language of survival:
rock,
root,
vine.

At the summit
movement ended.

I sat.
The body emptied itself.

Then the horizon opened.
Villages trembled with light,
as if unsure
they should exist.
Morning rose reluctantly.
Fields appeared, green, ordered,
persuasive.

Fatigue withdrew.
Wonder stood in its place.

The mind stirred again.
Not with peace.
With hunger.
With the remembered smell
of earth
still warm with life.

And then
at the mountain’s base
a dark point.

Another height.
Another call.

The question remains
undecided:

to remain,
or to continue.