ALL MY LIFE THE GOD OF THE MOUNTAIN HAS BEEN WOOING ME.
Poetry by Devan Murphy
Northeast Ohio Writer
Growing up in the heartland the holiest thing she can envision is a mountain. She dreams of being fierce enough, desperate enough, to reach an isolated pinnacle where no humans go, and there, she envisions, she will be given the answer to Things. In the winter, she practices wandering through the snow and telling herself she feels warm—and it works, a little. Anything she believes can become real. / Until she turns six, all six family members sleep in the doorless bedroom or the living room. But at last, that summer, a new addition is built, and in her father’s house there are, now, many rooms. One is for her. Construction leaves a mound of dirt in the backyard, as tall as the house itself. The children cannot reach the summit. It is too steep, and there are glass shards everywhere besides. But they play around the lower ledges in the shadow of the spire—paeons praising the deity who guards and protects them. We’ll keep it forever, their father says, but their mother worries about the glass, and about the look of the thing, and so the mountain is towed away, scoop by scoop. Remember the mountain? the children say to one another for the rest of their lives. Years later she knows it shouldn’t really have been called a mountain, might not even have been as tall as she believed it was. But the fact remains she never could have reached the top.
The title of this poem is taken from Till We Have Faces: A Novel of Cupid and Psyche by C. S. Lewis
Devan Murphy
Devan Murphy is the author of the chapbook I’M NOT I'M NOT I'M NOT A BABY (Ethel 2024), a collection of prose poems and essays and abstract comics about God and loneliness. Her writing and illustrations have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Gigantic Sequins, TheCincinnati Review, -ette, The Iowa Review, The Guardian, Biscuit Hill, and elsewhere. She was born and raised in and around Akron, Ohio, but now lives in Pittsburgh. You can find her online at devmurphy.club.
