The one below his mountain
waits in the din of light.
He marks the elisions,
the shapes stranger,
more subtle than knowledge.

No shadow without wait,
his eye at an edge
above the fault of thought.
The noise of words not wanted,
a rattle of agates or large-bodied insects.

There is only patience, and the light,
the size and angle of the change.
There is only earth and stone and here,
with an abacus of curve and straight,
to store and know the distance.

Patricia Nelson is a retired attorney working with the Activist group of poets in California. Her most recent book, Spokes of Dream or Bird, will be published this month by Poetic Matrix Press.