By Barbara Sweeney

Tonight on the mountain
I am startled by the sheer
geometry of love.
Every angle assumes a desired shape.
The round-faced child
breathes softly from a goose down bag.
Moon-white fields of ashen flowers
jag into planes of snow.
Two dogs sit
squarely facing the dark.

And as the mountain cuts into
the circumference of moon,
there is your hand,
cracked and weathered from our climb,
connecting the points,
slanting toward water.

Appeared in The Climbing Art;
Vol. 29, 1996