We stand in the ages now. Tell them
We cannot come back to the trails
Level on earth,
Nor go again to our birth.
The tune in the willow stem
Is high and harsh and given to the ledge,
The heart is winter’s and the frost assails
The Arctic minds we bear. Tell them our pledge
Invokes the jasper scarp, the frozen vein,
The colder blue, the night
Pouring its astral rain.

Say, we shall not be young again—
So long has icy light
Impaled our vision and our boundaries
Exceeded trees.

Early among the junipers we slept
On cool bookmosses,
But the restless foot, the quick
Blood in the body quenched the dawdling wick.
From snow to higher snow our blue trail crosses,
Our breath empearls upon the clouds of winter,
Our candle but a crystal splinter.

On levels long below us march the files
Of tamarack, and hemlocks on their knees
Reach down where rivers lie
In dwarfed unease,
Jagged as lightning down the colored miles.
There lie the countries where we shall not die
Among our native trees.

As rock bereft of moss, are we who ply
Our errand toward the everlasting sky.
Who measure all our days
From snow to snow. Harvests of grain we gave
To hearts content with care
Plowing their summer praise
In ambient air.
Gave houses for the mountain’s huddled cave.
Foreswore the smile, the breast
Easing the storm—we left
These for the north star's cleft,
To follow a mountain’s wave,
To sleep in the blizzard’s nest.

We stand in the ages now.
Never for us
The green field at the brow,
The homely dooryard or the friendly street,
The bed of rapture or the altar’s bread.
Never our graves up in a granite row,
Neighboring with the dead.

Crystal and tumultuous
The iron winters rage upon our tread,
And where our lost trails go
Look for us in the snow.