In December, the mountains sleep, too. After 10 months of blooming then blazing then raining

thin rivers, the sky shelters their summits in its one-coloured eye. Where only the trees  

blink, only the stars bead like supercooled water, melting at the nod of a transient sun.

At my desktop, I can almost believe I know the words for this month’s weather  

blown cursive. I Google the letters s- n- w- o-, picturing individual crystals of ice suspended  

like bats in our bright atmosphere, as though in hibernation. Each cloud suffers gently—this winter  

repeating, this winter a votive, this winter shaking light like a candle across the afternoon news. 

Confused by my own human failings, however, my PC wonders if I meant to type Snow  

(app) or Snow (beer) or perhaps Snow, Kentucky! I might’ve meant Jon Snow or Jon Snow  

the bastard or the British double agent whose codename was SNOW or ‘Snow’ from the classic  

White Christmas or Snowfall, the Thoroughbred horse. There’s even a 1936 poem titled ‘Snow’

by Mao Zedong, who cites China’s north mountains in a text I can never encounter.

I ask the internet to translate each MANDARIN CHARACTER, to justify its cultural context,

explain how I know more words for conquest than I do for the natural world. I was born

at the close of a tinderbox century and still I cannot tell poets from tyrants, corporations

from kings, this land so rich in beauty.¹ Now I am writing this poem to you, iced landscape.

We have lost too much history before we have lived it. Only the mountains can breathe me

into simple existence. Only the sky will say I speak your name, answer I want to hear you in the air.   

1. 江山如此多娇