First of all, I could go on and on and on and not begin to create the vision of your first few lines creates. I think that what I wished to say in my comments, but failed to, was that you provided an imagery new to me of mountains weathering up, not down. And that is magic.

But as I reread your post, even just the poetic beginning I see how fractional I am, as though I took off unchangingly on a vector at a single point in the very complex curving line you scribe.

Then I have an irredentist satisfaction in the elevation of my concentration. I revel in the potency of this self-satisfaction, doing, in effect just what the larger arc of your post decries.

A lot of great images in your comments. I can’t shake the feeling that you might have missed your calling as a science fiction writer.

there is constant exchange of territory, back and forth

Yes, that’s exactly what i was getting at in the post, I think.

The magic you add is spatial, of memory, formal and recognition based. Boulders, hillsides, loose their volumes and their looks to the air which continually displaces them. Shapes are nibbled by the air, occupancy of space is temporary. As I mentioned, so often mountain and hillside salience is associated with uplift. With uplift, instead of the sky retaking its space, there is constant exchange of territory, back and forth. Perhaps this liminal surface pulses like sand on a beach. Perhaps rocks simply can’t stand the loss of pressure up on the surface, and they perish like whales on a beach. There is nothing to hold a stone together once air encroaches on five sides, the sixth side being downward facing and the stone’s only fading memory of its kindred lithosphere. I wonder if my newly sharpened study will increase the rate of erosion? Thank you for the insight into our unravelling and replenishing hills!

And sorry for any tedious redundancies! I will cast and recast this new model indefinitely and in many pourings! I have to run outside now and see if the hills have moved any; I know I’ll be able to spot it.

“…I saw instead that they were tongues of pure thirst, slowly dissolving, giving rise to gray clouds.”

is permanent. And awesome.

But maybe not so permanent. There is a node within the wasting bed:

“…tongues of pure thirst…”

this piece made me think of dirt. Soil. Our soil is often red hereabouts. Not, I hazard, from the rhyolite that makes up the hills, but from iron remaindered from long vanished dolomite, as was suggested by our reading on the formation of drusy quartz. The sciences are always new to me and I don’t fear being speculative, or wrong . Perhaps the seas have dried twice, first leaving behind the limestone, then the limestone “evaporated” leaving behind the iron. The lead in the great deposits near Potosi was abandoned by the mountains of the Franciscan orogeny which could hold on to it only so long before letting go into air and water. Maybe the chewing sky spit the lead out like seeds which tumbled to busy atolls building in the sea.

Perhaps some soils outlast the hills, as hills feed themselves to the air. We have mild uplift here, so as the sky grows thirsty, hills are replenished, like a mother spoon feeding a child. Certainly though the mantle of soil on a hill drapes over a changing physiognomy, always much older than each newly arranged face pressing into it.

What the sky does not want the soil will use as bones and flesh. Do soils respire creatures and leaves? That blown leaf, causing you to brake, is that pulled along by the rush of soil breathing in.

I wouldn’t want to consider, though, that our rhyolite didn’t have a life. A tenth the age of the universe, it is fleeting under the tarrying boulders who cannot match its rate of waste.

Perhaps in some dolomite there is a breathing in as it’s metals oxidize. A better image for limestone might be breaths of taphony and exhalations of hard water. I never really learned the carbon cycle.