I've been trying my hand at an epic.

For many years I wandered in the peaks

And valleys of the lonely Pyrenees,

As one who doesn't know for what he seeks

But hopes to recognize it when he sees.

One moment at the summit of a peak,

The next with not a glimpse of sky at all,

Courageous but fundamentally weak,

And every climb is followed by a fall.

At one such height I dallied and surveyed,

Supposing to determine my next trail,

And saw in passing something human-made,

Some misplaced smoothness in the rough-hewn vale.

As I approached, the rising sun disclosed

Montalban, that Masada of the West,

Whose Granite walls were brighter than supposed

When by the rosy dawn they were caressed.

I never knew a better welcomed sight,

For I had long suspected that my task

Had no goal whatsoever and my plight

The Wandering Jew's: a different bed each night.

The magpie and the nuthatch stirred me bold,

With mockery or tapping, each to each.

And, right leg to gain ground, the left to hold,

I scaled until the entrance was in reach.

"Oh, surely," I supposed, "The gates are locked

And nothing but a swallow could go in."

But that great wall which Charlemagne had mocked

Was open to the flimsiest of men.

Considering myself invited in--

Why else forbidding gates would be unlocked?--

I crossed the threshold where no other men,

Since Rinaldo himself, had lately walked.

Above the treeline as the castle was,

I scarce expected Myrtle growing there,

But still one grew, undoubtedly because

The courtyard must needs hold some beauty rare.

And as I passed, I thought I heard a sound,

A plaintive whispering as if a man

Had followed me, but as I looked around

No body met my penetrating scan.

"Repent, and turn around, lest ye be lost,"

The echo might have said, if words they were,

"Thy curiosity shall bring thee cost

Of sanity. Vain traveler, you err."

The warning semmed to issue from the leaves

Of that same Myrtle which adorned the court.

But such things as a foolish man believes

I credit not, nor gave the words import.

Besides, the warning which I might have heard

Was baseless. If one daren't seek the hold,

No matter what the cost, his life's absurd,

And sanity is usless, truth be told.

* * *

And perhaps this one needs to be included in here somewhere:

* * *

Not because it is there.

That's not why people climb.

The mountain itself does nothing to beckon,

But I climb anyway.

Because the sky calls me

--and Nimrod, Moses, Icarus--

The next, the up, the why,

are nowhere down here.

Our lives are made of dirt and rocks,

Even the very summit of the mountain,

But somewhere things are sky and light

And who knows what else.

So at the supposed peak

The instinct is not to start back down

But to look around for suitable stones

And start building stairs.