watching the mists and mountains

some mornings you wake up to the mists, hugging close around the buildings, close around the mountainside, reducing all beyond this 10 yd circumference to conjecture, all hidden behind a veil of thick swirling white. i can hear the temple but i cannot see it, i can smell the trees but they are still beyond this block... tibetan flags shiver and horses stand garlanded in bells on the path. you hear these bells tinkling from somewhere beyond this veil, the whisper of voices, calling, and the whirr of car engines struggling against the steep incline.

other mornings up the hill you can walk back behind the school to look out on the mountains. beyond my forest of evergreen trees tall and straight as ship-masts standing out of the steep mountainside, beyond the green hills cut and cleaved, like roots thick gnarled and old of trees whose trunks whose bodies have long been cut away, beyond these when the mist finally rises you see them, those mountains of ice coming out of the clouds like some half-magical confection, ridges points pricks and long faces of white and gray. immense and impossible.

these october days by morning i wake up to a crystal clear sky, a vivid blue. every day there they are, the himalayas. i sit there an hour every day just trying to take the idea in. i don't know why it seems so impossible, unimaginable, uncomprehendable. why i have this obsessive need to trace their lines into my mind.

then by night in the mists and dimming late the mountains fade into the sky like a soft watercolor in blues and grayed purples. and to the west the sun setting, across the mists reds and oranges like a sea on fire.