Four Passes on Mount Horeb

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1 Kings 19:11–12 

for Matthew Lyman Rasmussen 

Pass I 

In winters it soothed me, 
the wind blistering peals 
through naked willows in the dark
outside my bedroom window, 
while warm and bound I marked
lost spirits sounding in the cold. 

But summer waned, 
the threshold pressed upon my racing ear
for Father’s midnight pacing, broke with
stark measured swearing 
at what death blew through the wheat crop
in that godless zephyr’s breath. 

Pass II 

Stakes driven into loose dry beans,
each anchored root waits proof 
that nothing holds in quake 
outside a roof of holy soil. 
Atop each grating plate a voice 
bodes, layered in the noise— 
“There is no other ground or stand
that I cannot destroy.” 

Pass III 

The ingredients are spare— 
heat, fuel, air. 
I saw the conflagration 
of a several-story pine, 
a wildland fire, south Utah, 
just prior jumped its line. 
Felled branches melting bootsoles 
dry O² crisp in lung, 
a desperate snap consumed by 
one last worse and cloven flame. 
Before I could exhale 
the same, black and white 
the burns the ash 
immersing whole the frame. 

Pass IV 

This is the new tongue. 
This will be your tongue. 
Hold your breath, your pain. 
Root yourself to the still-moving mount. 
Feel the heat of the word refrain 
as God rushes by 
bosom bent to the Earth. 
Straining. 
Straining. 
Strain.