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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