[Photographs by Claire Powell]
We are the stone’s
Long dream,
thundercracked
Into sudden smoking
dawn;
Unsealed with the mist—
A spell forbidden,
half-
Forgotten, we dance the
World alive,
Wild air in wild teeth
and
In our eyes the
unaugurable fire
Of every chartless
star.
Our day, our
Summer cauterized,
closed
In a sightwide
salamander rictus
That kisses the
cobble hills alight,
Blushes the taut
Canvas of our artless
cheeks, then gutters
Down its eyeless hell
as
Something more
tremendous yet turns
The bright cipher of
our bones on its
Ancient tongue, speaks.
You came to me in rumors,
Snatched breaths, a thing
Collected but
Never held. I received you
As a ruin receives the earth. And you
Loved me, I know, the best
My architecture would allow, folded up
My aching walls, made me
Home, at last, to a hunger
Not my own.