Anne Kellas #2 Thinking of a strategy (remembering Taking Tiger Mountain) in response to Kit Kelen #1 - the first post, December 2017

This journey’s a nail-biting, upward, cliff-wringing climb.
The path, clouded, in a drifting of time,
sways ahead, veers. A breath-holding effort
to get to the cliff-face. Up over the edge before sunset.
 – and me no climber at all, "forcing lines through the snow".
A foothold, a pause to look back
over lines of distance below.

All that green clouded out.
See down, far down.
All those words for things lost.
No upward flying, no downward spiral,
no thermals,
no thrust of a plane’s invisible updraft to
take hold of. I want, and I need, invisible bird-flight.

But we're flying now.
You’re pilot, belaying.
I won’t look down at the rocks below.
I know that birds fly free there, far down.
I have seen them write code in the air, their flightpath
deciphering spears of wilting light.
Sun sparks.

Peg steel onto rock.
Hold on.
Watch the cliff-face as clock –
for poems, someone said, are all about clocks.
Don’t think it through.
Grip those words by the fingernails.
Tackle it edge-on.