Clot-formed by lump of clay
Mounded, bounded
Escaping to the desert, we may
Fall open
Into seams of undoing
Like a walking wilderness
Wandering into attrition
And erasure, by scrag and by scree
The land is a quarry for souls.
The whole earth is our hospital.
Was someone laid to rest?
It’s a tectonic tilt of closure
When God hides them in a rock
And rolls the stone like a seal,
Skin turns to soil
Soil is the creed
Creed is a seed-word which,
In furrow and plough becoming
The truth turning over.
Sifting, shifting
Mara mud and Avon silt
Running in my veins like so much geography.
I am written with stones.
The crusting cairn is my emphatic punctuation
For sentences which are maps.
The terrain of promised purpose
Is a man-marked land.
Eruption of scar-felt scafell
Is a raw patterning
Trying to find the way home.