“There is no road, the road is made by walking.”

                                              -Antonio Machado.



There is always a war somewhere,

                a party going on, or a fireworks display

elsewhere in the cosmos, the strange

                 busyness of humanity, jackhammering

                                 away at silence.
In the dead of winter, the journeyman

          sets out to track the spirit of the mountains

a snow leopard, fur glittering like ice, paw-prints

                        wide as lotus-pads, as the leopard

becomes the mountain. Its prey, herds of yak

       punctuate the slopes, smudges of black wool

                              in a frozen eternity.
To the north, foothills of the Kunlun Mountains

           form a frieze, the glaciers melded into one.

Rivers of Tibet that never see the sea

                          disappear into Changtang’s sands

in the Buddhist way,

           snow finches and antelopes hidden

                             within this plateau’s emptiness,

animals, plants, single-cell life-forms

                       all fractals of the one mantra.
The world vanishes,

                           the leopard stretches and yawns,

                                          eyes ablaze

through the lens of a telescope,

                       the road burning with torches.