for Max Ross

No one knew why he built
a road over a mountain.
It started close to home
and wound through trees, past cliffs
not visited in years,
bound for the sea, but stopped
before it got there, somewhere
halfway down a hill.

They said, why build a road
that goes nowhere? But
it goes somewhere. It goes
out to a rocky shelf
that overlooks the steady
unceasing breakers far
below the traveler
who moves while standing still.

Perhaps if it were finished—
but it will never be
finished. It runs toward
not to the sea, an arc,
a proposition in
geometry, a brief
infinity of points
along a finite line.

It was for him a mode
of recall, of the son
who loved this place and years
ago despairing or
in madness killed himself.
Walking the road, he saw
what could not be left out
in the many tellings.

It made a kind of solace.
Yielding to rocks and shadows
at the end of order,
he waited for the long
susurrus in the trees
brushing across the land
like half-formed memory
or like the coming rain.

Original appearance in Pivot.