Geode

Geode


I still remember ocean, how
she came in with all I wanted,
how we opened the hard shell
we had made of what she gave me
and painted into that lodge's white walls
the shifting rainbows of wave-spray;
I remember even the vague drifting
before the shell was made,
my slow swimming among the manna
until I sank down into stone, married,
rooted there, joined its stillness
where the moving waters would serve us
as the moon would bring them by.
Growing, I remember how softness
of pale flesh secreted the smooth hardness
of shell, how the gritty pain
was healed with rainbow tears
of pearl.

I remember dreaming
of the new creatures flying through the air
as the sharks swam through ocean,
hallucinating featherws and dinosaurs,
pterodactyls and archaeopterytes,
great turquoise dragonflies
hovering, shimmering, hawking after the huge
mosquitos fat with brontosaurus blood;
And when I died
and the softness vanished inside
my shell and the sea flowed in--
I watched it drying as the waters ebbed,
saw how my bony whiteness held
at its heart the salty gel whose desire swelled
and grew and globed against the limy mud;
chalcedony selving edged and spiked its way
through dreams of being flowers trembling
against the wind, snowflakes falling
into a desert spring, but the rain
of limestone hardened around us
and my walls grew full of holes,
I waked into a continent of caves,
akarst-land where sweet water chuckled
and trickled, siliceated through
my crevices as once the salty sea had,
and I felt purple quartz-crystals blossom
where my pale flesh had been;
then I knew my dream
was true, and I waited for the soft hands
to come down like a dream
and lift me into sunlight,
give me there to diamond saws that
sliced me in two, to diamond dust that polished
my new selves of banded agate.

I let them separate and shelve them heavy
on either side of a word-hoard whose light leaves
held heavy thoughts between
the heavier wiser, older lines of all
my mirrored selves, the wave marks left
by snowflakes feathering amethyst
ways of being,
by all those words,
by the Word, made slowly,
slowly in-
to stone.


Carter Devard.....from How The Songs Came Down