Scale Practice

The ridge keeps its bright secret underfoot.
Light draws a blade along the slope and hums.
Wind combs the sand into rib after rib,
a slow grammar the sun keeps revising.

Far off, mountains lean behind blue gauze,
violet with distance, patient as bench-marks
hammered in stone. Clouds idle—chalk smudges
in a high hangar; heat loosens a mirage.

I climb where shadow sharpens into question,
each step writes ladders that slide away.
Grains tick and skitter—clocks without hands—
and day’s taut skin tightens, then loosens.

At the crest I am briefly taller than the world.
Then scale returns: a sea of tilt and silence;
my breath metronomic, the sky enormous.
From above I’m only a mark on a moving page—

one dark note
that slips between beats.