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.