In reply to Solaris:
here's the poem written down
A life-time divides us from the withered city -
Aging, finite, accelerating;
Time here expands to fill the space between our footsteps.
We tread with care the ice-cracked crust,
Nylon thin, stretched across a lava heart,
Kettled within a heaving caldera;
Senses, pin-prick keen, surface and boil,
Cold slaps like a midwife, as we
Gulp at the milk-white air,
Retreat glacially into the womb of the mountain
Cast from the fontanelle of the earth:
New-born, grey-skinned and ready to gasp.
Suspended by umbilical ropes
We walk the water’s winter-silenced rage,
A belayed cascade captured in the act of falling;
Everything that before appeared certain and fixed,
Melts, fuses, and re-forms around
Arcing flows of hands and feet-
Thought and instinct,
Known and unknown,
Seen and the unseen,
Sensing and believing,
Falling and ascending,
End and beginning
Become as the wind is to the sky,
Blood to the heartbeat,
Gravity to the turning earth.
We will be old again in the time-kept city,
But the eternal mountain
Lies like an ice splinter under the skin,
A flash in the corner of the eye,
A word caught on the tip of the tongue,
A thought frozen at the moment of its dreaming.
