Brian Simoneau
waiting in the wind and wishing for mist to gather you in, gravity and weather to work together to keep you in place, the weight of water to contain you, hold you to yourself, for fog to rob you of vision and make you invisible. Instead the rains wash you over, erosion grinding you down, snowfields and glaciers erased to reveal the damage they’ve done over time. Time flies but not when you’re a mountain, whole climates changing around you, ice sheets flowing and receding, bridges bringing peoples who eventually sow seeds of civilizations and raise stone temples, cities razed when empires fall, when crops fail or conquerors come or gods grow bored or all of the above at once, one word at a time languages losing their tongues and languishing, and you standing above it all, silent all the while, not quite as tall perhaps or flatter in spots, rock concealed or revealed by plants growing, by snow and ice, landslide, by wind, by fire. Time so rife with annihilation, so filled with ways to be worn down, no wonder you lean alone against storms, peek over clouds while stars spin their fleeting beacons in the infinite dark, surround yourself with valleys to catch and hold every piece that falls from your heights, every drop that runs down your sides.