The cave, like the world

By | 1 February 2020

The stone and the air enfold each other.
Their borders blur. The stone
sways the muscle of the air. The air
bleeds the silence of the stone. We breathe.
But the cave’s long exhale carries over us.
We walk. And each turn entangles us, twisting us
through catacombs of rippled ground.
Our skulls powder into a ceiling
darker than ourselves, dripping its fluid stain
into an artwork of protrusions, rust
and white and amber, the slow
rhythms reeling us into its hold.
We become

cave dwellers – the quiet
enters our hands and we give,
through the caverns of our bones,
the full length of our shadows.
The exchange cleans us.
How pervious we are. Imagine
sunlight and a blue dome.
Imagine the night, the stars’
perpetual fall, their precipice.

We have come to the cave, stepping out
of our other world, to pour the moment
of ourselves into the stone that is air
and the air that is stone. And when we return,
we climb into the day with the cave
in our bodies, the dark and the light like
birds sweeping inside us, one
past another. The sky’s arc pushes into us,
seeps into our pulse. And we give…
through the stretch of our tiny
lives, we give the noise in us,
all our force, all our tongues.

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