As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living.  T.S. Eliot, East Coker
And again I felt the tipping in the scales of us,  the intersection of our ages.  ....and me reaching for some kind of purchase,  or at least a shallow handhold in the thought that with every step apart, I am another closer to you
the sky rubbed raw over the mountains, us standing on the edge of the world, together against the view    
Just like the farmers who once came to scoop handfuls of soil from her holy scar,  so I am still drawn to her back for answers to every question I have never known.     
Inheritance. From my father a stammer like a stick in the spokes of my speech. A tired blink,  a need to have my bones  near the hill's bare stone. An affection for the order of maps and the chaos of bad weather.     
Four Movements in the Scale of Two. Study One. II - Still Life I sit, eyes closed, my naked back a canvas on which you paint,  drawing upon a palette of touches,  light across the skin, ...    
Summer. Bees go down at the  lips of foxgloves, nervous like a lover's first time.   
The sentence of her slopes,  The blunt wind glancing from her withers,     
Winter Swans. they halved themselves in the dark water, icebergs of white feather, paused before returning again like boats righting in rough weather.
And lay instead an ancient child.
  The land is three-sixty about you here, an answer to any question, stitched with river silver, so I think I understand why the man who lost his son comes here only in bad weather, when he can lean full tilt against the wind’s shoulder, take the
comes here only in bad weather, when he can lean full tilt against the wind’s shoulder, take the rain’s beating, the hail’s pepper-shot and shout into the storm, finding at last, something huge enough to blame.
The land is three-sixty about you here, an answer to any question, stitched with river silver, so I think I understand why the man who lost his son comes here only in bad weather, when he can lean full tilt against the wind’s shoulder, take the ra
veins mapping under her skin, over her twitching muscle; her nostrils, full of smoking embers.  
As if the notes they had sung have only now, with this unearthing,  slipped from their absent tongues.
And even now the earth stands sentinel,  reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.  
Nests clot in the veins of the tree - the rooks are a  passing infection. 
The swallows are italic again,  cutting their sky jive between telephone wires,  flying in crossed lines.   
If we were magpies love,  and some day a bright bait caught your eye and you were taken in a magpie trap,    a siren in a cage, then I would stay, perch above you, spread my wings in the rain and fan you with my feathers in the sun.
Her east-west flanks, one dark, one sunlit,  her vernacular of borders
Her weight, the unspoken words of an unlearned tongue. 
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