after Lori Keller’s The Road to Denali, archival pigment print
All roads lead to Denali, the peak
of imagination, tallest mountain from valley base
to unclouded summit
in the world:
First there is a mountain,
then there is no mountain,
then there is…
This highest ground also made of paper,
fragile as a leaf of poetry,
little tracks of words straggle up its side
bound to vanish
like the road to Denali,
like the Koyukon word,
like the tribe who uttered it
into existence as High One —
far grander than a prospector’s
pouch of gold nuggets,
far bigger than a president’s gut
stuffed with robber baron bribes.
Breath taking!
Such is the nature of Denali.
One cannot know a mountain
until it gazes back, no distance between.
One cannot ascend a mountain by feet
but by breath, the whole mountain
blown away.
Yet here Denali has risen,
lodged in the folds
of the mind, a testament,
a monument unto itself
elemented from laws of motion,
gravity and dissolution.
It would be obvious to state
this mountain is not here at all,
although all roads lead to the top
then back down to the sea —
this brief hiccup in the earth’s crust,
born from molten veins, the same granite glint,
light of stars, in our own sight.
Hello Tall One! echoes from the summit,
this little vastness greets you
where you stand:
First there is a mountain,
then there is no mountain,
then there is…
—
Ray McNiece is the author of eleven books of poems and monologues most recently Bone Key Sutra, Love Song for Cleveland, and Breath Burns Away, New Haiku (Red Giant Press, 2019). From 2020 to 2023, he served as the Poet Laureate of Cleveland Heights. He received the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. In 2022, he was awarded a $50,000 Poet Laureate Grant from the American Academy of Poetry for his Poem for Cleveland Project. www.raymcniece.com.
