Morning Grey

I hear a train horn in the morning grey.
I can so clearly imagine it down by the river.
With each reverberation it pushes against the quiet,
the rippled river,
all the way out to the mouth of the ocean,
and the coarse interior mountains at the end of the Columbia, the Snake, the Fraser,
off somewhere where there are elk and moose,
and the air smells like stone rather than sea.
I imagine myself on an arid hilltop, bowing to the sunrise.
The colors blot out the valley air, and
all the while the sun pulls on me,
and so does the hill;
old, quiet beings, the both of them,
spinning the world with their weight.