Meadow Work

Dean said a poet must get her work done and maintain her soul, 

And the way to get to two is by doing one

He said address the mountain, then address your heart  

I was trying to figure out what was true

What was irretrievable about a person

What was irretrievable about life

From the window of his final studio

Cezanne like a dog at desk regards the mountain

No friends but in trees, and the looming issue of beauty

The plane refracting, the landscape sheer density

The sanctity of a space being only for one thing, or one person

In the mountain glen an elder butterfly

In the field the big fear

That the end of grief is the end of love

We were doubled by the lake

Evidence of life in smoldering ground

A scar from August never healed

Having scraped my knee across fallen old growth

We went up the mountain and when we came down

The world was beginning to write

On the other side of already written on pages

This is how I would explain it

The mountain is a vector of color!

The Dowager Duchess discovered their volcanic origins!

Miss Burgess staggered daintily up one with a Christmas pudding!

While Miss Harriet Wickham drew the mountain grass!

And the shape the mountain hare made where it lay startled Yeats!

The mosquitoes broke, then the heat

We left the tent for the far edge where the colors were gathering

Dissolving in bruised tones 

We heard an avalanche form far away

One stream, dry in the afternoon, was rushing with clean cold water the next morning

The rock, which mimicked the brown hill in front of the mountain, 

With the vein of snow running down its middle 

You found and pointed out, I wanted to take it

I wanted to try and wrench nature out of the elegiac

Our fire flicked at the darkness

During Cezanne’s eighty-first attempt at putting the mountain to paper

The collar painted around his neck wore off with age 

And the leash staked deep in the meadow

Two sorts of love being braided evermore tightly

Fell slack

In short, the old feelings were back, rash and inconsistent

So right for impossible questions

If it meant getting something irredeemable back, something lost to death,

Do you think you could climb it in a day?

Because you’re not looking at the mountain, the mountain is looking at you, 

It is pulsating with something slippery and monolithic, 

Too big, too small

Veronica Martin is a writer from Portland, Ore. Her poems and essays have appeared in Fonograph Magazine, Hesperios Journal, Vestoj, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in poetry from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, and is at work on her first book of nonfiction, exploring the nature of the rose.