Alta

Wooden boards, rotted ghosts,
a mountain tilted toward fate:
Could be a year before high altitude
breezes wreak inevitable change.

The fear we face here
is changeless and ever changing.
Lizard's Head Peak stares across the valley
& telephone lines hint at the advent
of the first cross-current electricity.

Tesla's electrochemical blind alley
is the Philosopher's Stone.
The humankind who filled these homes
were hard as nails and cold as night.

Tourista legends tell of screams:
the echoes of old mining accidents.
But why would phantoms linger
in the freeze at twelve-thousand feet?

They had brave, wise hands,
time to read in flickering firelight
& dragged supplies up steep inclines:
timber & soap & Joe Smith's
betrayed final words.

Snow-crested mountains
scattered the sky
while pioneer intellectuals
drove the American man
to its alchemical peak,
then fell back down the hill.


Circuitry

God created man
in his own image
Man created computer
in his own image.
Computer re-created man
in God's own image.