The Most-Sacred Mountain

Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow six thousand steps
of climbing!
This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.

Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks of green; and
lower down the flat brown plain, the floor of earth, stretches away
to blue infinity.
Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their slow curves
against the sky,
And one black bird circles above the void.

Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
And with them broods eternity—a swift, white peace, a presence manifest.
The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is the end that has no
end.

Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years before the Nazarene,
he stepped, with me, thus into timelessness.
The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that says: On this spot
once Confucius stood and felt the smallness of the world below.

The stone grows old.
Eternity
Is not for stones.

But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift white peace, this
stinging exultation;
And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the rhythm of the
daily round.
Yet, having known, life will not press so close,
And always I shall feel time ravel thin about me.
For once I stood
In the white windy presence of eternity.