A Poem from Catastrophe
Down-turning the turn-over,
Over-turning the turning-down
Catastrophe comes always
fast and slow, always
announcing itself and
stealthy, steely, revealing
what has been there all along.
Time and catastrophe get lost
in one another
Enamored by the power the other
has to conceal and death-deal.
Collectives reel, wheel through
rubble calcified and unsure.
Some sift through the silt
and the mud to find people.
Others search to find any residue of
home, family, familiar.
Others miss their favorite restaurant,
or the parks where children played.
Others know this way of life
as the norm—crisis to crisis,
dust to dust.
Others walk around in a dazed-out haze
of too fast, too much.
Catastrophe is not built for any
comfort. No normal, no formal,
no plan, no denying that things
will never be the same.
The phrase “a perfect storm”
is beyond cruel when
the winds and rain have stopped.
Perfect destruction is privation,
the evil of the theft of vitality
the wrenching loss of zest.
We live in a state of life and death,
and yet lives and deaths
are somehow trivialized by
the sheer magnitude.
Is that the “perfect storm”?
The one that beats you to a pulp
so much that the ones who survive
use all our life energy to live
out what’s left and what’s lost.
The “perfect storm” is never over.
It hovers, it smothers, it others
the life we used to know.
These mountains teach us how to
turn and twist, they calibrate our bodies
to bend, but don’t break.
They teach us about cliffs and precipices
and teetering possibilities and
tipping points.
These mountains teach us to
lean and to glean, to
hunker down and to come out swinging.
Circuitous and matter of fact,
mountains are the children
of seismic shifts and spaces
up-turned, down.
I never thought much about my
last name, “Mount” except
that I figured it meant my ancestors
on my father’s side somewhere, somehow
lived near or on mountains.
Deep in my bones is a memory,
ancestral, elemental that
you walk the twisted, turning road
and find your neighbor to find yourself.
Catastrophe reaches down into
my soul and my soul answers
with a familial impulse to be
with what remains.