Grand Tetons

    by Luke Evans

The lakes were there, I am sure, as mirrors

in the pocket of a mountain range, ready to flip

open and view themselves, brush away a stray stone,

apply a shadow of mascara beneath a watchful summit.

They are in this way not prideful but like women.

It is not a vanity, but an assertion of one's appearance,

and the distinct responsibility that comes with beauty.

These women, however, have no need for dancing

or lowering a line of sight. Their valleys were deeply visible

already, but it was the peaks that had us all enthralled.

Time was their benefactor, not their bane, and the pocking

of a thousand-thousand rains served only to slough away

what didn't belong, to remove, like a sculptor, what

was never a mountain to begin with, leaving only her.

They say plates shifted and crashed against each other,

and the rent drew high into the air, or, as science claims, one plane

set upon the other. Either way, the inexorable erosion of space

compares to how, when she sits next to me now, I can see

where her wrinkles tomorrow will be and know, like those mountains,

her beauty can only enhance the stone that lies beneath.

© 2014  Luke Evans

Luke Evans writes sometimes, about life or science or love or mountains or whatever else his experience or imagination allows. He lives in Colorado and works too many hours, but enjoys the views anyway. His poetry has been most recently found in The View From Here, Poetry Quarterly, and Joyful.