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| Issue 16: | 1 Jan. 2023 |
| Poem: | 873 words |
| Glossary: | 1,141 words |
By Beth Copeland
Mountain Cento
One I walked ten thousand mountains to marry this place. I set my body solidly upon the path, to confront all the unclaimed bleak wild stretches, leaving nothing behind, nothing on the bed, no version of myself. Now I fill my gaze with the stripped body of rock splintering the sky like a broken bone. I collect my fragments one by one and go on, bodiless, searching in the dark, pushing through solid rock in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone.
Two You climbed up on the roof of the world, up where a red-tailed hawk lifted and caught wind, where so little changes you hardly notice how time goes by. The trees give into wind and cold, give in to the sky’s slate. You take on the likeness of a tree and the ordinary hush of moss on stone. When you live alone, you have no worries. When you leave the doors open, no one bothers you. Noon upon noon, you customize this solitude with spires.
Three The deepest demarcation can slowly spread and sink like any blurred tattoo. I splice the mountain, its body and mouth gaping. A new body is painful. Exposed, it must retreat as if the trees were not indifferent— the maples and shagbark hickory, especially the beech, at this time of the light. All the maps change. There are new mountains sculptured in block and cleft and cornice, a clean branch from storm and avalanche. Nothing can sweep over me to remove me. Wandering free, I roam the woods and streams.
Four At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards. We are made of clouds and etched with holy meridians. Here, we live on the edge of nothing, in the heart of everything, giving ourselves up to the time of the light, turning and turning to clouds. We are a flash of fire—a brain, a heart, a spirit. We saw a raven very high above us. It called out, and the dome of the sky seemed to echo the sound. We made no noise. No more noise than smoke. We found your footprints in the snow. We brushed them all away.
Five I am a bird from mountains you don’t know. For so long, I was a stranger to myself, dreaming of snow and birch forests blue in the powder of smoke. How did I arrive here? You spoke of meeting in another life at this holy shrine where I’ve left you. I wish for the other side of the moon, the harsh monumental lines of the mountain. Year after year after year. I am still in love.
Six Pure snow-water from the holy mountain. Tears from faces of stone. Such grief might make the mountain stoop, reverse the waters where they flow through snowed hills, through tall spiked trees. Shadows fall down; lights climb. Now the world stands, visible through your body, and is transparent through your transparency, a snow skeleton, attached to nothing. The white spruce will never forget your name.
Seven First, there is a mountain; then there is no mountain. Fog drifts across the valley, rises up the ridge, erasing the rocky drive, the house surrounded by woods. The path is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber. Clouds make a rout of shapes crossing a windbreak of cedars. The world is quiet and empty as I step over fallen pines. Such moments come in mist, or snow, or a summer night. I walk until my thoughts become like clouds parting, and the winged heads of bodiless cherubs, and in that moment I become another person.
Eight Each moment of time is a mountain in a country of ourselves, in a country of bright stones. Far from reach, moving towards measureless distance, the wind comes down from the northeast, cold in September. We turn ourselves against its gravity. An axis we defy. We are just two brief blips of wet electricity written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. Newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones. We wait for a long time in silence. There is no time that is not loss.
Nine Walking with voiceless steps like the shadow of clouds, we found deer hoof prints in dirt and noticed every thistle, splinter, butterfly over the drainage ditch. Mostly, I think I remember the grey sky, the broken fence, the dry scent of a dying garden in September. What are we to make of this passing flow? Even absence holds matter, piles up like deadfall branches, like the marmots and birds, or tents, or piled stone. A wafer-thin wind spades up loose dust from the path. We do not look back at the mountains.
Ten I leave the windows open all night. A new moon. Mountain breath. Baby blues. There is a space among the white flowers of the rhododendrons, a breath the wind trapped and forgot to exhale. For me, it’s a wingspan. For you, they float light as moths among the branches. You can so easily throw open the windows of my heart. You’re the mountains and the lake, the memories. Nothing can undo us, my strength and yours. Come here, I’ll hold you in this wilderness.
Mountain Cento Glossary
A cento is a collage composed of lines or passages taken from other writers. The lines in this cento (some with changes made in verb tense, punctuation, and line breaks) are attributed to the following authors:
One
Line 1: Bertha Rogers, “Mountain March”
Line 2: Helen Hoyt, “A Woman and Mountains”
Line 3: H.D., “All Mountains”
Lines 4-5: Clifton Gachagua, “Mountain”
Line 6: Sandra M. Gilbert, “The Mountains”
Line 7: Sheri S. Tepper, The Visitor (p. 1)
Lines 8-9: Octavio Paz, “Sunstone”
Lines 10-11: Rainer Maria Rilke, “Pushing Through”
Two
Line 1: Kate Bush, “Wild Man” on the album 50 Words for Snow
Line 2: Imogene L. Bolls, “The Dream”
Line 3: Czeslaw Milosz, “A Magic Mountain”
Lines 4-5: Martina Reisz Newberry, “Why It Shudders” in Blues for French Roast with Chicory (Deerbrook Editions, 2020)
Line 6: Octavio Paz, “Sunstone”
Line 7: Lisa Creech Bledsoe, “Call the Mountain” in Appalachian Ground
Lines 8-9: Han-shan, Cold Mountain: Transcendental Poetry by the T’ang Zen Poet Han-shan (Wandering Poet, September 2015)
Line 10: Alice Fulton, “Daynight, With Mountains Tied Inside” (Poetry, May 2012)
Three
Lines 1-2: Elizabeth Bishop, “The Mountain”
Line 3: Nisha Atalie, “Do/Do Not” in Poem-a-Day (7 May 2022), Academy of American Poets
Line 4: Emily Skillings, “Tenant” in Poem-a-Day (4 July 2022), Academy of American Poets
Line 5: Denise Levertov, “Gathered at the River”
Lines 6-7: Imogene L. Bolls, “Photographing Myself in Shadow”
Line 8: Ursula K. Le Guin, “We Are Volcanoes” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
Line 9: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (p. 19)
Line 10: Marya Zaturenska, “Inscription on a Mountain”
Line 11: Helen Hoyt, “A Woman and Mountains”
Line 12: Han-shan, Cold Mountain: Transcendental Poetry by the T’ang Zen Poet Han-shan (Wandering Poet, September 2015)
Four
Line 1: Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
Line 2: Lisa Creech Bledsoe, “The Storm and Home of Us” in Appalachian Ground (2019)
Lines 3-4: Martina Reisz Newberry, “Queries” in Blues for French Roast with Chicory (Deerbrook Editions, 2020)
Lines 5-6: Imogene L. Bolls, “Our Common Memory”
Line 7: Thomas Wolfe, in Look Homeward, Angel (chapter 35)
Lines 8-9: Dorothy Wordsworth, in Grasmere Journals 1800-1803 (entry dated July 27, 1800)
Line 10: W.S. Merwin, “Animals from Mountains”
Lines 11-12: Kate Bush, “Wild Man” on the album 50 Words for Snow
Five
Line 1: Xuận Diệu, “Foreword to a book of poems” in An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems ed. and tr. by Hùynh Sanh Thông
Line 2: Lisa Creech Bledsoe, “Listening for My Life” in Appalachian Ground (2019)
Line 3: Czeslaw Milosz, “A Magic Mountain”
Line 4: Mikhail Lermontov, “I am writing to you...”
Line 5: Han-shan, Cold Mountain: Transcendental Poetry by the T’ang Zen Poet Han-shan (Wandering Poet, September 2015)
Line 6: Martina Reisz Newberry, “Five Poems for Pablo Armando Fernandez” in Blues for French Roast with Chicory (Deerbrook Press, 2020)
Line 7: Imogene L. Bolls, “Our Common Memory”
Line 8: Virginia Woolf, in A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary (entry dated February 27, 1926)
Line 9: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Letter to Nele van de Velde” (13 October 1918) as quoted in Letters of the great artists—from Blake to Pollock by Richard Friedenthal
Line 10: Gary Snyder, The High Sierra of California
Six
Line 1: Tsangyang Gyatso, Sixth Dalai Lama of Tibet (1683–1706), in Songs of Love, Poems of Sadness: The Erotic Verse of the Sixth Dalai Lama, tr. by Paul Williams (2005)
Line 2: James K. Baxter, “Letter from the Mountains” in Selected Poems (2010)
Lines 3-4: Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem: Dedication” in Poems of Akhmatova (1973); selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Haywood
Line 5: Martina Reisz Newberry, “Travelogue” in Blues for French Roast with Chicory (Deerbrook Editions, 2020)
Line 6: Elizabeth Bishop, “The Mountain”
Lines 7-8: Octavio Paz, “Sunstone”
Line 9: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (p. 42)
Line 10: Lisa Creech Bledsoe, “Found” in Appalachian Bound (2019)
Seven
Line 1: Donovan Leitch, “There is a Mountain” (1967)
Line 2: Pat Riviere-Seel, “I Will Not Let You Leave” in When There Were Horses (2021)
Line 3: Terry Blackhawk, “So Here” in Vox Populi (3 August 2022)
Line 4: Trumbull Stickney, “Mnemosyne”
Line 5: Theodore Roethke, “A Field of Light” in Praise to the End!
Line 6: Sean Prentiss, “On the Walk Home from Apple Tree City’s Tree Stand” in For the Love of a Book (Artemis Journal 2022)
Line 7: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
Line 8: Imogene L. Bolls, “The Dream”
Line 9: Maria Rouphail, “Wonder Woman”
Line 10: Cynthia Huntington, “The Rapture” in The Radiant
Eight
Line 1: James Wright, “Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem”
Line 2: Theodore Roethke, “The Harsh Country” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Anchor Books, 1975)
Line 3: Naseer Ahmed Nasir, “Line of Control”
Line 4: Tony Hoagland, “A Peaceful Transition”
Line 5: Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, “Pole | | Sport”
Line 6: Dean Young, “Age of Discovery”
Line 7: Heinz R. Pagels, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature
Line 8: Carolyn Forché, “The Museum of Stones”
Line 9: J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Crossing”
Line 10: Dawn Potter, “About Mothers” in Vox Populi (22 August 2022)
Nine
Line 1: Naseer Ahmed Nasir, “Line of Control”
Line 2: Jessica Lee, “What the Heart Does” in Rattle (#77, Fall 2022)
Line 3: Dean Young, “Delphiniums in a Window Box”
Line 4: Richelle Buccilli, “Sparrow” in Rattle (#77, Fall 2022)
Line 5: Theodore Roethke, “The Far Field” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Anchor Books, 1975)
Line 6: Pepper Trail, “City River, Portland” in Willawaw Journal (Issue 12)
Line 7: Rick Mulkey, “The Language of Rivers” in All These Hungers (2021)
Line 8: John Muir, in John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir ed. by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1979), p. 321
Line 9: Jimmy Santiago Baca, “[Today, running along the river]” in Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande
Line 10: J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Crossing”
Ten
Line 1: Gail Langstroth, “Composting on Earth Care Farm” in Vox Populi (31 August 2022)
Line 2: Elizabeth Spenst, “Poem for Myself” in Rattle (#76, Summer 2022)
Line 3: Marianne Moore, “An Octopus” in Observations ed. by Linda Leavell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016)
Line 4: Rick Mulkey, “An Explanation” in All These Hungers (2021)
Line 5: Liana Sakelliou, “Fatherland” (translated by Aliki Barnstone) in Poem-a-Day (15 September 2022), Academy of American Poets
Line 6: Mary Oliver, “Sleeping in the Forest” in The Ohio Review (Winter 1978)
Line 7: Lisa Creech Bledsoe, “Winter Love Poem” in Appalachian Ground (2019)
Line 8: Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior’s Apprentice (p. 305)
Line 9: Helen Hoyt, “A Woman and Mountains”
Line 10: Martina Reisz Newberry, “Orphanage” in Glyphs (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)
Publisher’s Note, 29 November 2023 (723 words):
An alphabetical list of sources for “Mountain Cento”:
- Anna Akhmatova: “Requiem: Dedication” in Poems of Akhmatova (1973); selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Haywood
- Nisha Atalie: “Do/Do Not” in Poem-a-Day (7 May 2022), Academy of American Poets
- Jimmy Santiago Baca: “[Today, running along the river]” in Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande
- James K. Baxter: “Letter from the Mountains” in Selected Poems (2010)
- Elizabeth Bishop: “The Mountain”
- Terry Blackhawk: “So Here” in Vox Populi (3 August 2022)
- Lisa Creech Bledsoe: “Call the Mountain”; “Found”; “Listening for My Life”; “The Storm and Home of Us”; and “Winter Love Poem” in Appalachian Ground
- Imogene L. Bolls: “Our Common Memory”; “Photographing Myself in Shadow”; and “The Dream”
- Richelle Buccilli: “Sparrow” in Rattle (#77, Fall 2022)
- Lois McMaster Bujold: The Warrior’s Apprentice (p. 305)
- Kate Bush: “Wild Man” on the album 50 Words for Snow
- Xuận Diệu: “Foreword to a book of poems” in An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems (ed./tr. by Hùynh Sanh Thông)
- Carolyn Forché: “The Museum of Stones”
- Alice Fulton: “Daynight, With Mountains Tied Inside” in Poetry (May 2012)
- Clifton Gachagua: “Mountain”
- Sandra M. Gilbert: “The Mountains”
- Tsangyang Gyatso, Sixth Dalai Lama of Tibet (1683–1706): Songs of Love, Poems of Sadness: The Erotic Verse of the Sixth Dalai Lama, translated by Paul Williams (2005)
- Han-shan: Cold Mountain: Transcendental Poetry by the T’ang Zen Poet Han-shan (Wandering Poet, September 2015)
- H. D.: “All Mountains”
- Tony Hoagland: “A Peaceful Transition”
- Helen Hoyt: “A Woman and Mountains”
- Cynthia Huntington: “The Rapture” in The Radiant
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: “Letter to Nele van de Velde” (13 October 1918) as quoted in Letters of the great artists—from Blake to Pollock by Richard Friedenthal
- Gail Langstroth: “Composting on Earth Care Farm” in Vox Populi (31 August 2022)
- Jessica Lee: “What the Heart Does” in Rattle (#77, Fall 2022)
- Ursula K. LeGuin: “We Are Volcanoes” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
- Donovan Leitch: “There is a Mountain” (1967)
- Mikhail Lermontov: “I am writing to you...”
- Denise Levertov: “Gathered at the River”
- W. S. Merwin: “Animals from Mountains”
- Czeslaw Milosz: “A Magic Mountain”
- Marianne Moore: “An Octopus” in Observations ed. by Linda Leavell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016)
- John Muir: John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir ed. by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1979), page 321
- Rick Mulkey: “An Explanation” and “The Language of Rivers” in All These Hungers (2021)
- Naseer Ahmed Nasir: “Line of Control”
- Martina Reisz Newberry: “Orphanage” in Glyphs (Deerbrook Editions, 2022); and “Five Poems for Pablo Armando Fernandez”; “Queries”; “Travelogue”; and “Why It Shudders” in Blues for French Roast with Chicory (Deerbrook Editions, 2020)
- Mary Oliver: “Sleeping in the Forest” in The Ohio Review (Winter 1978)
- J. Robert Oppenheimer: “Crossing”
- Heinz R. Pagels: The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature
- Octavio Paz: “Sunstone”
- Dawn Potter: “About Mothers” in Vox Populi (22 August 2022)
- Sean Prentiss: “On the Walk Home from Apple Tree City’s Tree Stand” in For the Love of a Book (Artemis Journal 2022)
- Rainer Maria Rilke: “Pushing Through”
- Pat Riviere-Seel: “I Will Not Let You Leave” in When There Were Horses (2021)
- Theodore Roethke: “A Field of Light” in Praise to the End!; and “The Far Field” and “The Harsh Country” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Anchor Books, 1975)
- Bertha Rogers: “Mountain March”
- Maria Rouphail: “Wonder Woman”
- Liana Sakelliou: “Fatherland” (translated by Aliki Barnstone) in Poem-a-Day (15 September 2022), Academy of American Poets
- Nan Shepherd: The Living Mountain
- Emily Skillings: “Tenant” in Poem-a-Day (4 July 2022), Academy of American Poets
- Gary Snyder: The High Sierra of California
- Elizabeth Spenst: “Poem for Myself” in Rattle (#76, Summer 2022)
- Trumbull Stickney: “Mnemosyne”
- Sheri S. Tepper: The Visitor (p. 1)
- Hunter S. Thompson: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
- Pepper Trail: “City River, Portland” in Willawaw Journal (Issue 12, Spring 2021)
- Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon: “Pole | | Sport”
- Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel (chapter 35)
- Virginia Woolf: A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary (entry dated February 27, 1926)
- Dorothy Wordsworth: Grasmere Journals 1800–1803 (entry dated July 27, 1800)
- James Wright: “Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem”
- Dean Young: “Age of Discovery” and “Delphiniums in a Window Box”
- Marya Zaturenska: “Inscription on a Mountain”
Beth Copeland
is the author of Selfie with Cherry (Glass Lyre Press, 2022); Blue Honey (2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize winner); Transcendental Telemarketer (BlazeVOX, 2012); and Traveling through Glass (1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award winner). She owns and operates Tiny Cabin, Big Ideas™, a retreat for writers in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Author’s website: https://bethcopelandwriting.com/about/
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