Moving Mountains

I have moved ten mountains
in my sleep. This is the only
purpose of life, moving mountains.

They are all shapes and colors,
these earth spewn mounds
and vagabond hillocks.

Each so different from the other
that it forces me to learn
its ways like a new lover.

Here beneath this rock I find
one mountain's Achilles' heel,
soft and raw to the touch.

And there, in the core of an oak tree
dry rot has spread, cancer-like.
It is not that I'm entranced with

the archaeology of ruins,
though it be full of fascination.
It is just that I find moving

mountains--a valuable hobby,
as if I were some Prime Mover
in the Land Below Waves,

in a ritual of my own perceiving.

Tatiana Retivov is a Russian-American poet and translator residing in Kyiv, Ukraine where she runs a literary salon and publishes books. She holds a B.A.in English Literature from the University of Montana and an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan, where she received an Avery Hopwood Poetry Award for poetry in 1980. She has translated "Brodsky Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries. Vol. I" (ed. by Valentina Polukhina), and "Mandelstam" by Oleg Lekmanov into English.

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