How to name a mountain

It will come to you late at night
as you rumple a strange bed

with all the day’s restlessness,
wrestle pillows into similar

triangular positions, how to
remember a name. Listening to the train’s

howl biting night’s expert ear, you learn
the mind’s pace,

label everything from whiteness
to dying as overwintered secrets.

And in the morning you begin
to call one gloat when it talks

down to you; one claustrophobic
when it closes in; the treed one

pride when it gets in the way
of the horizon.

Nouns linger in dead grasses
unpacked from hibernation’s suitcase,

words you work out
on the treadmill of the tongue

persistent thoughts ironed out,
this smoothing simple the past’s

echo, an outline
you can never fully stash away.

Call this the repeat of what you keep
working on, what you try to translate

and understand, memory’s sharp questions—
things you can’t name.