Which came first, mist or mountain?

No-one knows, no man alive, nor in the tombed enclosure

By the old Baryite mines: not even the dotted sheep, generations

Grazing on tumbled cairns, stone circles, chambered tombs

Or huts now dents in fields. No-one knows if one day

The mists thickened, or parted like veils

To reveal a maiden’s breast, or a jagged comb;

Or if one day, the granite in the clouds, always nascent,

Simply solidified, into a massive unconformity.

 

Arête, col, moraine, corrie; these are all words I learned in school

Much later. Words we use to describe something that is wordless,

Elemental, too old to have words of its own, or if it had,

They are now incomprehensible

As marks of cups and rings

Once carved in weathered stone

By hands that long since blessed the sky in prayer.

 

Such crags, clints and grykes, drumlins and eskers

Were lodged early in the glacier of my schooling,

These words we give to mountains too big for words;

Hoping to appease their Gods,

But surely something this dramatic

Cannot just have been ground out over years by ice

Oozing in the long groan of its melting; surely

These mountains are mere scenery!

Created right now, conjured by the art of wizards, druids,

Using the ochres of rowan, slate, heather and blaeberry, somehow,

And when the mist comes down again,

They will rumble away, on some hidden mechanism

Changing my island fantasy, its acts and characters, once more.  

 

Life is made of mist and mountains,

But how to tell which is which, ah, that’s the question:

How to tell which came first, and what my face was like

Before the mountains were made of mist, or mist of mountains, 

Before the nameless people flint-scored their marks on cromlechs:

First there is a mist, and then there is a mountain,

Then there is no mountain, then there is.