Touchstone
You are rocks
clattering down a hill, the screech
of an owl on the wing
warm and flying.
You are breath of land in Spring, the
warm exhaling
a white soft prayer
rising to the sun.
You are roots of trees drinking,
those deep wires burgeoning
the black
to a green fruiting.
You are silent in your dream of loam
earthy, fragrant, clean, yet your thinking
unseen, unsaid, is turned
inward on itself
dark as turf, hazed as woodsmoke
blurred and thickening.
Your breath is stone, the granite
grit beneath my tongue, your gravel laugh
scrapes my throat and as I fall, tough roots
score my skin, my purple fingers
torn.
The land and all things in-between my
eyes evacuate, and I drink the sky
as clear as if I never had
been anywhere but here
beneath these pines, those rocks
littering the ground behind.
Curlew cries are plaintive overhead
and flints dig hard my back, gorse spines
flame and spike yellow at my toes, in
my ear the grass grows
over stones
green and dimming.
Sunlight hits the hill, charges purple, clashes gold
high rocks dislodge, tired of stasis, roll
and roll
while far below obsessive in the dark,
moles shovel.
Here is the heart compressed
and slow, the
coldness at time's core ancient, hollow, you
rest close to those distant beats, the
heart-murmur
soft and slow. In rings of shadow
concentric and narrowing, you rest close
to time's slow swallow
to all I do not have
to all T do not know.
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