the earth here is an unclosing wound, sedimented silence opening into
stomata gasping old air, the churn of a matrix of memory and bone.
see, in these hands, these eyes, and the strange curve of my thumb
the broken lilt of the words on my tongue and in my head, grasping and wrestling,
the flow and the give, shame and fear, and love, heady and heaving.
continents push and pull and spread, passive margins grow thicker.
repressed and repressing, geological strata come out stark and naked
layed and layered out flat and falling under the same sun, ancient oyster beds,
the lively ancient ooze of life hardened into a blistered substrate.
graves sink into the soft earth, cedars embrace, shadow, shadow, the dark blood
in our veins and coursing over the hard chalk undrunk, settling into
the lowest places. rich, and thick with snakes, the same venom runs in me.
they’ll lay me low in under the overlapping boundaries, thin lines etched
in everything, you cannot escape. there is no escape, even in death,
taphonomic processes come for you too. everything passes on, and everything
passes. sins of your mothers and fathers, tektites embedded in the stone,
the long slow and sudden inevitability of process and time.