Up Hope Mountain – Julian Lasher

October 3, 2025

Tell me we’ll make it: tell me the way’s clear in the headlit dark. I’m driving with you snow-blind in the falling snow over the mountain. It’s a cold night in January and God knows how we made it to Idaho, and I want to be beside you forever in the falling blind your face snow-blind white it could be my last day on earth and I’m ataraxic unsleeping beside you driving up the mountain. I can see your smile in the corner of my eye in the passenger seat of my car. I’ve been reckless and I know we should’ve stopped at the last Motel 6 but that was before we got here on the winding road near the top of the mountain. When we’re home, when we’re back and we’re in your bed warm with the white sheets pulled up to our chests—but we’re not home, but we’re driving higher now, and I’m homesick for places the rearview mirror has shown me but we’re climbing heavenward into the blizzard as we rise up the mountain. The snow is falling like snow is falling in old television and its white like the light in physics or staring at the sun, it’s white like nothing and I see nothing and I see nothing but you. We’re near peaking I want to climb higher with you I want to know nothing else but you. Climbing the mountain we could open the trunk and abandon we could abandon everything we don’t need it on the mountaintop, up there like mystics, like Tang poets we can dive down to the inner blizzards of our own giving up being known and giving up being and giving up, I’ll drive forever if it gets us there.