Man Alone on a Mountain, by ​Patricia Fargnoli

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich (Germany). 1818.

Man Alone on a Mountain

​You stand on a black rock pinnacle with your back toward me
and look out over a rock-strewn valley which is half-hidden in mist.
In your long black coat, knee-boots and walking stick,
you seem a stranger from another century.

Before you the lower mountains, sharp
with black rocks, hover like a flock of petrified sheep,
that has wandered from the shepherd
until they are lost and frozen there.

Wind disturbs your red hair. Your balance seems precarious
and I wonder what brought you there
where the fog obscures so much?
How long did you climb and with what difficulty?
Why are you alone and what are you looking for?

Why does anyone climb to such a place?  Once,
in winter, driving by myself after a snowstorm,
I pulled off the road by the trail that led up Avon Mountain.
And, wanting to see if I could do it, I struggled up the slope
which was slick with a foot of snow and ice.

My breath like sleet in my chest,  my leg muscles,
unused to such climbing, ached with the strain.
A few clumps of snow fell from the pine branches onto the trail.
To this day, I don’t know what I was thinking.
If I had slipped and fallen no one knew where I was.

But you, I wish you well, stranger with the hidden face.
You seem self-assured as you stand there
sturdy but wholly alone under an uncertain sky–
its diffuse clouds, one taller mountain before you
a gray-blue blur in the distance.

​Patricia Fargnoli

​Patricia Fargnoli's fifth book, Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, was published by Tupelo Press in 2017. Her previous books have won awards such at The May Swenson Award and the Sheila Mooton Poetry Book Award. A forme New Hampshire poet laureate, and Macdowell Fellow, she's published individual poems in such journals as: Ploughshares, Praire Schooner, Alaska Quarterly et. al.