The ridge hovers,
its long, prone torso
concealing the lay of the land beyond,
a floating wall. Meanwhile,
the news wars. The crow on the roof
caws. Maybe he says “Go Buddy!”
to the crow who taps
a walnut shell on the driveway.
Open, each half is segmented
by papery chamber-walls,
a heart; the nut, a wooden brain.
The crows, smart birds, enjoy the best
organ meats. Meanwhile, the humid air
is becoming water,
beads of sky that bead
catalpa and paper-birch leaves—
large plates for a light meal.
Who’s eating, who’s eaten?
Meanwhile the mountain behind me
has got my back, I like to think.
I imperil me, not soldiers charging
from the rear. I think
the little blind cloud, migraine,
and its aura of blurs
appears. I think my daughter’s lupus
can wolf her down
and mother wolf can’t howl it away.
And my dear friend’s cancer,
tumors’ blind potatoes,
terrible moons in the womb’s night.
Meanwhile, the mountain is
absolute presence—is, was, will be.
Only earth itself can move it.
The crows call from it.
We must climb it someday
to see the crows at home,
beaking their stick and nail
tools, aligning them,
so they can eat more thinking
from the bowls of broken hearts.
The mountain whose name is Meanwhile
is also called Endure.
The wooded ridge ascends just blocks from here
like a slightly sloping castle wall,
but the tree-tops’ bumps and kinks are too chaotic
to be Medieval battlements’
crenellations and merlons.
The gray-and-white Percheron
I saw grazing a clearing there,
I lately can’t find when I look.
Calm and sweet-natured
battle horse, strong to bear
the well armored knight:
you are noble in all the ways.
Did I tell you I carry
the name of God’s mother?
Her sanctity is not my burden,
though I do love a good shade of blue
hooding the mountain.
Some days the mountain is a wing,
so large it could be an archangel’s
if there were any—Michael,
Defender of the Church, warrior
enough for the Percheron.
A reiki practitioner once told me
she sensed the saint’s presence,
an aura around me, an arch
of wings. Maybe he can defend
my faithlessness from the mountain.
Mary B. Moore’s books include Dear If (Orison Books, 2022), Flicker (Broadkill River Press, 2016), and The Book of Snow (Cleveland State UP, 1997). She’s received awards lately for poems from Nelle, Nimrod, Terrain, and Asheville Poetry Review, and has poems published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Catamaran, and more. A native Californian with a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry and prose, she taught poetry, Shakespeare and writing at Marshall University. She is married to the philosopher, John Vielkind. They live in Huntington West Virginia with Seamus Heaney, the cat. She has one daughter, an attorney, in Northern California.