Stone & Water

Water and stone

Cold is the anti-numb

The touch of her insistent fingers and thumb

Reminds me of the electricity that swims

Between my cells’ membranes

So thin

I cannot know where the air and water start and end

Light is the only sign of time

And the rocks have no skin

I hear the sound of water moving all around me

As though it echoes from the many bloody rivers wrapped around my bones

Inside is outside and outside is in

I lay myself bare on the water and stone

A leaf falls

Moss drips from the corner of my lips and eyelids

Bare bodied creatures traversing icy puddles and pools

The sun opens its eye wide to gaze at a nymph

Pale, silky and cool

She wades into the river

Turns to greet the light

Beds over backwards

Magnificent contortion of spine

Eyes wide and wild

Cheeks and neck flushed

Golden hair swimming like a koi fin

Beneath her upturned head

And, desecrating our heavenly hush

A cackle cracks the rocks

Sends ripples upstream

Sharp pelvic bones, ribs and pointed nipples

Echoed by the return of a creature’s scream

Her lively flesh and bones greet the sun with a contentious blaze

And fills the valley with a mysterious life-loving haze

She rises

Slow

Sinks her thighs into the piercing cold

Slips face-down into the river

Airborn fish

She floats

Folds and unfolds

Another leaf falls

A rock finds its way to the inside of my palm

It whispers, 

“The cave grew me in a little ear-womb. In the earth, I held water like a sponge before turning to hot liquid stone. My rivers carry stories of ancient times, when the Earth was a seemingly barren rock and Mercury was a cloud of shards. Go to my cave and to walk blind, so that you may hear my mother’s song; the gentle echo of water droplets shaping mountains from the inside out. From the outside in.”

The leaves fall

Water turns to ice

And after years upon years – long meditation of touching stone, she reaches for my flesh, sliding fingers and thumb between ribs and pinching the skin under my breast

I am folding and unfolding

Chosen by stone, we find our way to warm, dark places to rest.