THE
QUARRY AT REGENWEG
—for
Jan Bogaerts
With
that feeling of déjà vu, I came
home to a land
bright
with flowers and heather bogs wrested
from
the distant mouth of the North Sea.
The
wind lifted my skirt, verifying my sex,
as
I gathered metamorphic rocks—
once
the backbone of mountains—
reduced
to lining these raised roadbeds.
Strangers,
we were sleepwalking the fields;
the
cows watched with indifferent eyes.
I
saw you radiant in the afternoon light,
your
camera, like a bird poised for flight.
The
alluvial grass frantically waved
as
if to warn us of lions and dangerous currents
hidden
in the transparent layers of history:
this
ancient riverbed where the golden armor
of
a Gaulish warrior from the quarry was dredged.
We
made allusions to walking on water,
I
stood in the arena of the mirrored afternoon
wondering
which reflection to trust,
afraid
to find myself on the other side,
like
you, no division between the sexes.
The
pantheistic September sky hissed,
wounded
by the forthrightness of distant steeples,
all
that blueness leaking back into the sea.
Like
salmon roe, mountain ash berries,
enflamed
the carnivorous sky.
The
milky horizon blurred until we
once
again were sleek silvered fish
readying
for that final incestuous journey.
We
forgot about extinction,
hypotenuses
of triangles,
or
the collapsing of time itself.
Like
lowing cattle, eager for salt,
the
wind licked at our legs.
But
it was time to return to the barn,
we
had no arms to let them in—
only
the dark, knotted tide rising
over
the shield of grasses
and
defeated stones.
No comments:
Post a Comment