It's Still Life

El Capitan’s Lesson

I came to you from the east,
from Mono Lake’s dead and living water
tangled with krill
and seagulls by the million.
A lake that does not know it’s dead.

And the sun, that old familiar,
washed your coarse-grain granite
with the same brightness
it has washed for hundreds of millions of years.

Same colour. Same dip into darkness.
Same.
Again.
Again.
Centuries with numbers beyond my reasoning.

I drove into your long, narrow throat,
through mountain darkness
and sky dressed with stars,
and lay down in the orchestra of night.
Sounds without names,
a symphony that did not need me
to be heard.

Morning pulled me from the tent
on a thread of human sound,
birdsong stitched as one and indistinguishable,
the ordinary music of waking.

Then I pulled open the door.

A stream of sun-sparkling clarity.
A deer at its edge,
staring as if I were the strange one.
And then —
up.
Up past sense.
Up past the place where eyes can hold.
El Capitan, rising not like stone
but as time turned visible.

So high my centre of gravity spun.
So old my spine remembered being young.

The millennia had pulled me into their throat
and shown me the weight of ages.
Not to crush me.
To place me.

You are small, they said,
and momentary,
and exactly where you belong.

I carry you now, my El Capitan,
not in my eyes,
but in the place where balance lives.
You are my moment on earth,
my spinning centre,
my forever reminder that

I was here.
I saw.
I was, for one bright instant,
the deer,
the stream,
the stone.

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Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is authentically my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.