What the Mountain Keeps

They met where the wind forgets the word mountain

and learned to speak in something close to silence

a language neither named nor called love

that never quite knew how to become home

so it wandered, always pulled toward return

like weather folded into the wide sky

The days were carved into the shape of sky

above the ridge where they first named mountain

as if naming could make it less like return

or soften what could only be silence

but everything they built refused home

and stayed instead in the grammar of love

Even distance learned the outline of love

stretching thin beneath an unchanging sky

where absence became its own kind of home

and memory pressed itself into mountain

nothing there ever fully broke the silence

it only changed direction into return

Every road bent quietly toward return

as if the world itself remembered love

but could not speak it outside silence

so it hid inside the endless sky

and waited in the shape of mountain

for something that might finally feel like home

They carried it with them—what is not home

a weight that moves but never return

that lives in the body like a mountain

and rises whenever they think of love

even the air seemed too small for sky

and everything else collapsed into silence

What remains is only this long silence

that refuses to leave, refuses to be home

it follows them like weather through the sky

and bends the distance between them and return

until even memory feels like love

still standing, unbroken, like a mountain