You’ve heard talk of famous ones—
The Smokies, The Rockies, Everest,
Kilimanjaro, Olympos Mons—

and there are peaks no one names,
the one you climb
out of sleep every morning

to spend a day at work
in the rare, thin air, a monk
in a monastery high in the Himalayas

where you earn a supper of rice
with salt
and deep sleep on a hard mat

shaped like the far plains.
In your dreams
wild horses neigh and whinny,

hoofbeats echoing off the mountains,
each beat an avalanche
that didn’t happen.