Middle Ground at Katahdin

by Jacqueline Moore

Middle Ground at Katahdin
— “For the mountain madness is on me.”
                                            Marsden Hartley

He thought he’d escaped
his highs and lows,
his volcanoes & potholes,
& pigments of excrement.
The fleshpots.

He went on a pilgrimage to
Katahdin, squeezing joy
straight from a tube,
a shot of fox red,
a splash of viridian green,
hard blues, jigsaw ice
choking a pond with lilies.

I can’t keep up with his
new-found color,
don’t trust his Mary-
had-a-little-lamb cloud,
his end-of-life buildup
of pyramid engorged
in kindergarten blues,
his mountain goddess
brooding in the background,
feeding her pond,
strangling her pines
in reflection.

Did he enter the mountain
with no passageway to the sea?
Or did she enter him,
driving him like a crazed loon
into glacial waters,

strangling him in lily pads,
washing him up beyond
his own water line?

I hope he laughed
as he frogged his way back
to the middle ground,
pond by pond.