Despite your cloak of thick grey cloud, I keep going, past the warning sign that says the road will close as snow is on its way. I walk across your flank, your paths all slush from recent rains and the gush of water from countless rock crevices, usually dry. I should have worn sturdier boots and place my feet strategically. The promise of a blue-sky, 17-degree day is back down at sea level. Here it’s 6 degrees colder and the feeling is not to linger. Arrrgh says the raven arrgh, that’s how it is up here. The other birds keep quiet. A chorus of wind and rain pushes at my back. Runnels have gathered leaves into tidy piles. A border of lime green moss lightens the mood, tempers the existential anxiety that sits beneath my fragile heart and propels me here. At the junction, in the doorway of the cabin, I think maybe that’s why people feel the urge to scribble and scratch their names on wood and rock: to declare their encounter with the overwhelming fact of your ancient mountain self and how you will continue to outlive us all as our bodies return to the earth. Do I hear footsteps? Perhaps it’s the animals who make their homes in your forested and stone magnificence. I turn back. Not to retrace my steps that have already disappeared beneath the flow of excess water. But to make new steps on this familiar path and, even after forty years, notice something for the first time. See myself in the future, a clast of rock. What do I know except what my brief impressions gift me, my thoughts a flowing stream, my mind its own weather system.

Anne Collins lives in nipaluna/Hobart. She writes poetry and creative non-fiction. Her most recent book is a collection of poetry and prose titled Listening to the Deep Song (Bright South press, 2022). Her other titles are How to Belong (2019); The Language of Water (2014), My Friends, This Landscape (2011), a four-poet anthology Seasoned with Honey (2008), and The Season of Chance (2005). For further information, see www.annecollins.com.au