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From Your Driveway I See Mount Pisgah

Laura Hope Gill

for Dan Dutterer

The distance between our houses
Grows crisp in the winter,
The mountains sharpen their edges
Against the still night.
 
I don’t know how you recovered 
From the accident they said would paralyze you.
I don’t know how to trace the healing in your spine.
 
I drive the distance between us always aware
Of the western ridge of the Smokies,
Visible from the end of my road and from yours.
How a drive can seem to take so long
 
And still the mountains keep that distance
Permanent—those shoulders of sleeping friends,
Lounging flagrantly across the horizon,
 
As though they could sleep that deeply forever
And not move except to breathe. It’s like watching a coma.
After all these years, you ask if I think you’ve changed.
Less than a hundred miles away, there’s Mount Pisgah,
 
Its high red aerial shining in the night
Like a spinal column animating the sky.
I love to know where it is.  
 
Living up here I find
You learn a few landmarks
And take them with you everywhere—
Like taking the seasonal pull inside
 
To guide the earth through its changes.
I think we take the land in as reading
And know its every page.
 
Perhaps when they said you’d never walk
You only listened to the mountains,
And from their memory of the accident
Called the landscape of the ridge your body
 
And in silence read it out loud.
It’s so hard to picture you in stillness,
But the mountains must have taught you.
 
They are always moving in ways too immense to see.
And when you began to move again
Maybe they, too, began to feel.
If you’ve changed, it is in the way mountains change,
 
All those fallen leaves, the tender shoots remembering
What’s permanent does not move outside the earth,
What force in us that heals stays the same.
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