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Back to the Limestone Barrens Project WORKS-IN-PROGRESS: There is a
calm here. A ragged A cedar grows as a heart
might, Whole forests the size The dead ones linger and shine, "An ornament on a great
teacher's head," Half Log Dump How stones glow next to skin, I gather up all your greys: from Calcareous crush, earth's
slow river. I know, I know, but I'm
always looking If the sound of a black hole
is b-flat, Little Cove Like a heron stalking its
prey, head crooked, The Anishinabe
have always been here. If you chisel limestone, you'll
find: I want them all. All the
smooth warm ones, A huddle of ladybugs turns
the grey stone What we call holy – a few
days, some Suddenly the biologist calls in the
raven. Liz Zetlin
Har Prakash Khalsa, Waves and
Particles, Burnt Cape, Newfoundland, 2004, 3 Fuji Crystal Archive colour photos, each 75 x 75cm.
David Morrish,
Pavements, The Burren, Co.
Clare, 2003, silver gelatin print, 19 x 46 cm. Barrens dumb giant, I have no words to fit what I find on Burnt branches,
lost in a moss-mound shrub, alder? bearberry? its various kinds of leaves or
this end tree, the other shrub? what looks like a driftwood stick – scrawny, barkless: I reach to touch – is hard as a porcelain handle bolted
down, bone beads stuccoed into the
somehow live grain leaf puddle tree flush with the gravel it grows in, flayed trunk shaved to a blade by wind is the willow something the great gull of winter shat from the
sky? a
splatter tree? dry snake from a shadow opening leaves in the sun follows philosophy rather than habit, needs flakes of their bodies blown across gravel everything needs first of all something to hook to, a seagull breast feather caught on a sedum stem, a father's songs, a larch needle halts in the feather's lea, lichen crumbs, moss dander sift in, a willow seed opens bone turned to stone prehuman
shell grains in thin drifts in a crevice, grass like a tuft of white hairs, bobbing pocked shards, corroded fists worm script on the gods' grey chins for five hundred million years every day The Palaeozoic Times
was delivered here, vast page piled on page, deaths, celebrities, wealth, stratagems fused and fractured, I crawl on the lost familiar text, nylon hood flapping my
ear Book Rock If all the
used cooled blood gathered in thick
pools and became rock, organic iron ore,
and we mined it to forge steel, girders and rolled plate would buzz with
dense anecdote like limestone walls –
warm stone, bonestone – inside, a humming
saunter still carrying on Notes on Burnt frost here
causes the rock to boil – wedging ice into cracks, on the
bare cape each erratic block has a wind shadow (pointing
south-east) -- pillow of tiny plants gripping trees in
the form of mats or vegetation-spills grow their branches
down among stones as though into air – double roots, sky
and earth transposed we become
giant, must lie down to distinguish the parts giant, yet
dwarfed -- sea and sky stretching on to remote sometimes
braided into the muscle of wind are clear ocean
sounds -- waves leisurely sloshing, thumping, gulls' reedy
pleas or high-pitched slow staccato -- rolled past the ear in an
intact bubble * * * The Role of Calcium in Evolution Sweet
calcium we found we could live with, stir into
our cells' hubbub, tinker into a trellis
to carry our fierce red vine – its eyeball
blossoms, cunt orchids, cock orchids – we could
whittle it into stilts and paddles, hooks,
tongs, helmets, mallets, cleavers, awls, rasps,
rattles, tweezers, folding spokes, but
then, oh god the weight of all these contraptions! just throw them out and be
light!
while the old bone hardware clatters down like
Victorian claw-foot settees settling
in scrap hears – the ear horns, the spurs
compressed in archaeological files – we
float careless as fruit flies in an armoury, all the weight lifted, trala! but the
dark rock candy of history dissolves in the
rain, leaking the diatom's binary code, the
lobster's molecular gospel into the
water we drink. Sleepless we pour over Things You Can Make with Calcium in cellular Braille.
As soon as you throw something away you need
the damn thing! Hinged pincers down here
somewhere under the catapults and greaves.
Tell me how else to deal with the world! I am
sifting down through shafts of light, krill
clouds glittering in the currents, my
smoothness, my hardness, my shield I have dropped,
opened my hand and let my money fall, I am
all smile, it is possible to be only an open
door, the whole sea running harmlessly, genially
through your eye holes, ear holes, mouth,
while the shield sinks down and down,
glinting, a turning silver flake
joining the deep litter, we can stretch completely
out in the long descent, pillowed in glow,
in the water's mouth, in the sweet yellow
intricate feathered moan Wind-shadow Wind off
the the cape
clean. Anything wanting to live here finds it
enjoys crouching in a still wedge behind a
rock (filled eight months of the year with snow)
where once in a while a companion or other
treasure will tumble in: an ant's leg or
lichen crumb. Just arrived is another scuffed
mountain avens seed, which in the next rain might
burst its seams and help pack the small
summer room with green – except for the
boundless week in July when it imitates snow. Leif
Eriksson dropped the erratic fact of his
briefly inhabited outpost here, and now
the fascination of tourists gusts over the
ancient site, their exclamations and money
tumble into the shadow it casts along
route 436, feeding a clump of
restaurants, gift shops, B&Bs, new bright-painted homes. The local people want more
boulders like L'Anse aux Meadows, more nooks
where money drifts in, especially now that
they've raked the Strait clean of cod. John Steffler, |
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