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69
looking across the canyon
at the mountain, trickling
headlights along its road,
the trees roaring now and
dark below, their wrenching
tops catching the red
of a last fl are of the sunset.
No car passes. Nobody else
out here. The wind hurries
its new, clean, cold volumes of air
through the big vacancy between him
and the mountain: old elation,
come of this icy freshness
in things in their clearness,
shapes -- in the sharp air
of this one deepening dusk -- black
now and unreturning,
though a man travels
no more than a tree.