The swimming hole abuts

the swimming mountain

she said and I believed her

until I began to think about it,

but I hated to see the mountain disappear

so instead I thought about weasels,

handbags, the future, people I hate

because they are performatively tickled

when it’s time to say vagina,

I thought about flashlights vs. torches,

what it is to carry a torch for someone,

how it could merely be a kind act

with a curiously symbolic narrative description,

how ideally one’s life would be composed

entirely of such acts, composed, I guess,

by gods, and I thought of the cowardice

of certain of my selves

and fire, I thought of fire

scorching the hillside and meanwhile

the mountain stood just beyond

my interior peripheral vision,

I ached to preserve it

and thus thought of instructions

I’ve failed to absorb

due to my inability to invest myself

in many aspects of life on earth—

bridge is a nightmare

and on occasion has caused me

to behave very poorly—

I thought of Jimmy Stewart

as “The Man Who Knew Too Much”

and regretted it immediately

as he was followed by Doris Day

singing “Que Será, Será”

to her truly terrible son,

thought how is it I can hate

a seven-year-old, it is astounding

I can hate so many people,

those who greet each other

at volumes exceeding

their actual degree of enthusiasm,

I thought of slapping

their big friendly faces

with whatever was at hand,

a lake trout

or my hands themselves,

those most constant of weapons,

I thought of the gradual increase

in the cost of stamps and payphones

and of course the gradual

disappearance of the payphone,

several payphones in particular,

I thought of one poet’s criticism

of the word “particularly”

and another’s dismissal

of those who laugh at Shakespeare’s plays

and I thought to them

I am just as despicable

as those I enjoy hating and so

I turned against said poets,

turned and accidentally caught

a glimpse of the mountain, disaster,

it was disappearing,

I had to stop,

I had to turn around

and think

of how I would love to milk a cow

but not to drink the milk,

how there are so many opportunities

for me to calm myself

and concentrate

on small, repetitive acts

so that even if the mountain

has vanished completely

I will not know it,

I will not sense its loss,

my mind will be elsewhere,

browsing the produce,

rearranging in order of sweetness

the just-arrived fruit.