The Natural History

1

your body

was a landscape of history –

I’d live inside its mountains

and declines, trace its steep and gentle

rise and fall.

the heat of the earth under your skin

warms your bones,

calcium carbonates –

you tell me

stories of your tectonic shifts,

the old grind,

the backbone of your country

those rocky hills.

those heights and endless depths

match you,

the dark scattering of life upon you –

the liquid core of you.

  

2

that breaking bone,

spine of my country.

his monstrous vertebrae

under the crust.

the arch of his back

and cave –

that geographer

shaped the land he walked on,

studied.

3

I am the god

of the wanderer river –

its feet

eat away at ancient rocks,

the endless cycle.

I am

the century’s daughter –

the steaming valley my descent

under the ground.

the tapping caverns

birth a wildness in my skin –

their limestone bones

are the calcium of oceans.

Where I break all things,

their component parts –

the god of the mountains where I grew –

that dominance of ages...

solid earth against my fingers.