Mountains Swoop the Best Ideas

You would like to move stones about
Whatever passes for your thoughts,

An exercise in landscape art,
In learning to let the earth talk—

You think of monumental art
As a massive conversation

With leviathan at the mouth
Of whatever you have to say,

The rocky throat of whatever
Your thoughts need to roar in chorus.

Stones sit in slabs at each cliff’s edge,
And the finish on the concrete

Is partly the worthy polish
Of thoughts grinding against themselves,

As in one of those childrens’ kits
That grind gravel to glossy rocks,

But imagined on grander scales,
So that the broken mountains gleam

As they did years ago, shining,
Artificially smooth ideas.