Where there was only shadow and brownish red and reddish brown crumbling stone against the sky now a sheen descends the folding slopes lighting the sheep and pashmina goats like dim flames of a thousand ghosts at the nomads' summer settlement. The sheen creeps down across a frozen marsh of green hummocks uplifted, I don't know why, like miniature ranges. Between them laced sheets of ice delicate as the glaze over a crème brulée melt and feed the grass the horses find sweet. In stone-walled pens

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... kids gather the goats for women's strong hands the texture and color of the udders they squeeze, squirting warm milk steaming into ice-cold pans. They will shear and spool the silky underdown into what we call cashmere from the name of that borderland of traders where conflicts over maps employ the poor for war and dub the dead ones heroes. Two chapped-cheeked children run at ease, traipse over and ask my name, as they move with the seasons across the plain. The moon over the west ridge falls as the sun over the east ridge rises balancing for a moment like eyes.