As always, your use of words that appeal to the senses puts me into the place
and makes me experience it. I have never been in a cave and to go into one
is one of my least desires. I think it is psychological, something that
triggers an avoidance response because a cave is so much like a grave. I like the
poem, Arthur.
The earth's bowels made me a bit uncomfortable, though. It was the image.
Otherwise, excellent. Sue
<< The speleologist.
Once well inside, down that first drop on twisting rope, spun like a spider
over a welter of spray that twinkled down and away from him into the darkness
below, when the entrance and the day are long lost, his light flickers and
fails; the mask of darkness tightens over his face.
boots chime on rock
purity of absolute
echoes peal and crowd
His senses reach out into the cave; hears the stream in the blackness, the
beast-lick of waters lap and twist past; cold, hard aching cold, shaping the
cave around him. Here it is tomb-dark, his hand before his face and wide blind
eyes, feels the unseen rock, ancient life locked there, once teemed in lost
oceans and turned to light, changed now and hard.
water through dark ways
melts and relays, renews
ripples of pale silk
The huge mass of the fells pins him, treads him underfoot, as he slithers
like a lizard through the thin mud; tastes the grit and ooze of earth on his
lips; crunches coarse sand in his teeth. A pitch that will not go, a way that
pinches off, narrows in womb-tight, holds him in its clenched fist.
a stone rose blooms
under his searching fingers
blood on his knuckles
The cold, the wet and the hardness press. He lies still and knows the suck
and pulse of the cave’s dark heart. Time and water transpose, unravel and fold
newness in.
He listens to the bowels of the earth draining and replenishing, turns from
the depths towards the light and the air somewhere above moving over green
dales, fresh and bright with spring flowers under a wide sky.
the day closes slowly
in moist greyness and warm winds
an owl unfolds >>
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