"Works In Progress."
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2015
I’m going to the Edudeebo museum for a look at the mountain that looks like a cradleboard which is like swaddling clothes to a mountains aren’t so used to being kept in, they can spread out and up and down like lights or like pants, my love is like a volcano, it is not a quilt under which you cuddle, mountains are lonely places, me, it makes me wanna cry but “help me” is the thing you should never say lest you are already at the top of the mountain and it all becomes a metaphor for, say, flying or even worse, landing. But the leaves rush by meaning there are two different kinds of vines dividing the front from the back. I keep forgetting to thank you for the white bench meanwhile the sun came out again as if another day was beginning, maybe on the other side of the mountain, of course we can’t know what’s going on over there - is it the opposite of what we can see? this is just our simple-minded way of looking at things as if a mountain had a meaning like a cult named after a drug, sort of.
reel to reel
there’s only a squirrel
on the sun-drenched pedestal
But yikes! There’s iguanas on the roof and suddenly the wind blows and the mountain is a room in which a pizza’s exploded at the entrance to the museum. This color yellow darkens as the days pass.
latsedep dehcnerd-nus eht no
lerriuqs a ylno s’erreht
leer ot leer
~
© Bernadette Mayer 2017
~
Bernadette Mayer is a poet and prose writer. Mayer taught at the New School for Social Research and The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in N.Y.C. She was the 2015 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She currently resides in the wilds of upstate N.Y. and is published by New Directions.
You may read more of her work as published in Poetry Magazine here.
Or purchase her published books from New Directions here.
