There are wide rivers in this land still rich with fish, and beyond, behind, in spite of the dark ranks of Forestry Commission profit, beauty in deciduous ebb and flow, colour and fall, nakedness before winter. There are too high-flown crags impassable, unreachable, un- scaleable by us - places our hands can't reach to strip and chew. This wide purple-green waste with deep eyes of blue is still covered by an infallible sky, cloud-filled, puff-balls of moisture moving inland from the sea refreshing barren spaces. In its thin week-long stretches still breathes this ragged rock pierced by metal, crushed concrete, roads upon which we ride. We have new beasts now. It keeps different time - its slow heart coursing mineral wealth as cargo - the grooves of its mind cut deep by glacial memory of extremes now distant. It lives in summer climes, despite us, with its own wave and move, growth and spread, our small communities tiny to its size taking-over nothing - for nothing is ours. Our days are fleeting, glass-blown things, easily shattered, unlasting. Our own bone breaks down to feed those to come - keeps the globe rich of vein. There are places you might tread you never want to reach again - places so inhumane, so inhospitable, they frighten, and we long for our own kind, however lacking. Most days I think of you - your modern kist and ancient stone I wrote upon trying to hold you in a place you did not belong. A machine takes me home, away from spirit and its breath breathing in harshnesses, a brilliant sky, diamond light, deep water, the heaving of the heart. Our lives are geography and weather more than we know. Our bodies fashioned by the place we bear and grow, an isthmus with its secrets indivisible from the land our feet know.
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