Stone Circle

poem #111

photo by the author

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...so that when you sleep
aired in cold light,
your mind no longer buoyant 
in the sun’s boiled breath,
your head may become porous 
as a fossil on the beach,

buried half in blue dunes
after they tumbled a thousand years
and sunned, waiting;
half in the rushes of twilight,
uprooted, twined in a crown
over the brow of the earth—

then, the pool 
of your mind eddies
somewhere else to hide, 
a new shell, and finds nothing: 
only the mountain dead, perfect wounds 
tracked through its chest;

towns that seam the hills
to the mountain's ruin,
and occupants who whisper in sleep
that days were once arrayed
by a shining weight
carved from the icy peak...

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