the age of this place!
and still it said the basalt flows
of the Garibaldi range
are relatively young—
one could say something,
then, maybe, about lenses,
about powers of scale, how
a thing comes into focus, so
another falls away, something
about the buoyancy of names,
floating above a place, vagaries
of translation, of words soft
as wet ash, how this alphabet
cannot spell them, how silt
turns this lake otherworldly
and opaque, how at every cursive
turn of trail we stopped—
from a distance, in a sun break,
and framed yet another photo