Abandoned Mill, Colorado

High on the shoulder of the mountain

where the road gives up its name,

the mill leans into the trees

like an old man listening for news

that will never come.

Once there was the sound of work —

iron biting stone,

timbers shuddering under weight,

men calling through dust and echo

while the mountain gave up

what it could spare.

Now the silence runs deeper than the shaft.

The wheel is gone,

the ore long carried away,

and the narrow trail that climbs the ridge

belongs mostly to deer and wind.

The boards have turned the color of storms.

Rain writes itself into the grain.

Snow settles in the rooflines

as if the place were meant

to be slowly buried and remembered.

Spruce and aspen crowd close,

patient as time,

their roots working through the slope

toward whatever the miners left behind.

From far off the mill looks stubborn,

a mark against the endless green —

proof that hands once tried

to bargain with a mountain.

Up here, effort lingers longer than voices.

The men are gone.

The silver is gone.

Only the structure remains,

holding its quiet ground

above a valley that has forgotten

why it was ever climbed.