Watershed Case
I’m not saying they are the unmoving, blind stones — I don’t really believe stones are unmoving
or blind, not truly — but on that scale-heavy day, on that glaciated, wind-whipped divide, as I
stood between two massive watersheds draining the mountains back-to-back, never to meet
I looked down from the granite-gray storm spilling towards us across scree and spine and saw the
measured reach of evergreen in jade, emerald, bice and viridian, moving like water across the
striated rock, steadily, unquestioningly, as if winter would come, or not
and knew they would still be here, long after me or my daughters or my daughters-daughters had
explored our valley deeps, each plant generous and patient with the ice-scraped ridge holding
fast beneath them in ways I will never fully grasp, but maybe glimpse
these green beings moving as vivid and fluid and tenacious as the water now soaking the rough
knuckles of the far ridge, soon to fall and settle and freeze and expand and eventually to crack
these stones, shifting them until they too, lay open again to meet under a clear and wide-eyed sky