Mountains

I don’t want distractions, a woman thought one day, I want to pay attention to one thing.

If you do that, came a countering voice in her head, you will be noticed, and noticed for the wrong reasons. The world is supposed to be modern, and modern cannot be fixed in time. It has to move with time, and we must do as many things as we can, all at the same time, in order to keep up.

The park bench was still damp from the previous night’s rain. She had been sitting and only thinking.

What do mountains do? Surely a mountain was still—mountains seemed not to be a part of time at all. Time sought above-average returns by taking above-average risks. In order to manage risk, a person needed to analyze, at the same time, more than one piece of content. Was the content worthy? How would you rate its value?

But a mountain was silent. To see its worth, if indeed it possessed worth at all, a person had to look at a mountain a long time, knowing all the time it was just one thing.

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Laton Carter’s poems recently appear, or are forthcoming in, Bear Review, The Brooklyn Review, The Citron Review, concīs, Sonora Review, and Sycamore Review.