1.

The rocks trembled every day for over two months and in parts of Tibet a sick person or a woman who had given birth to a child was carefully prevented from sleeping. Sometimes the flower is so constructed that the insect cannot get at the nectar without brushing against a stigma which, perhaps because males tend to fall asleep more rapidly than females after intercourse, returns to stone needles. In the process of collapse the star’s outer layers compress. Lying naked in the pouring rain, our wetness the world’s wetness, our hard bodies the makings of rock. We took no photographs. The vacant plains were a featureless screen on which we projected our memories of , of elsewhere — quick! Before it....

Meanwhile, the females of the indispensable earthquake rest quietly in the half-closed blossoms, sharing the power of sleep, oblivious to our pain. I was long in doubt concerning the origins of these conditions of stress, horror and exhaustion. That two different organisms should have simultaneously adapted themselves to each other. During the third severe shock the trees were so violently shaken that the birds flew out with frightened cries. Bubblelike cavities formed by expanding gas. Solid pieces blown violently out of the womb. Glass surfaces, brittle and gleaming, formed by rapid solidification. Touch me here. Wrinkles, pores in the earth’s skin, basalt lavas swelling from beneath, channeled in fissures, dust and ash. The cries you hear are only the continuing shock of life.

"It is a fatal delusion which presents the earth as the lower half of the universe and the heavens as its upper half. The heavens and earth are not two separate creations, as we have heard repeated thousands and thousands of times. They are only one. The earth is in the heavens. The heavens are infinite space, indefinite expanse, a void without limits; no frontier circumscribes them, they have neither beginning nor end, neither top nor bottom, right nor left; there is an infinity of spaces which succeed each other in every direction.

A mountain chain is an effective barrier. The slow movement of underground waters carrying silica into sandstone. Limestone metamorphosed is marble. Bedding planes obscured and mineral impurities drawn out into swirling streaks and bands, swirling streaks and bedding planes obscured. He is tall and arrogant, questioning and vulnerable. Cold tar will shatter if struck but will flow downhill if left undisturbed for a long time. Shattered and flowing, flowing and shattered if struck. Hard things that were soft. Soft things that were hard. Hot things that were cold. Cold things that were hot. Wet things that were dry. Dry things that were wet. Old things that were young. Young things that won’t be old. It stops somewhere? Prove it.

Under the mist a solid prose of rocks, rocks and water, hard rocks and flowing water, safe rocks and treacherous water. Rough rocks, motion frozen to the touch, thorny black volcanic piles, a vein, an aggregate, a channel worn away, a pit blown or swirled out, grains, knife edges vertical. And smooth rocks, covered with pale and slippery algae, soothed to a fine old gentleness. Patterns of water, ancient muds, slow curves.

In some alpine mountains high above the timberline, sheets of frost-shattered rock fragments creep slowly down the valleys making curious tonguelike forms. My mouth. My tongue makes love to my mouth, searching its cavities for the softest, wettest places to fondle, sliding past and over the hard sharp teeth so that it hurts a little, overlapping, lapping its own roughness, slipping across the toothmounds under the gums and falling into the dark throat. Craving in. Prose, not poetry. Its tentacles reach in more directions at once, from a solider base, at a natural pace. It circles and radiates, has a core and a skin and a network of capillaries instead of only arteries. Memories wear away the present to an older landscape. My leg, thicker at the top than at the bottom, stronger at the bottom than at the top, stranger at the top than at the bottom, more useful at the bottom than at the top. At the top, plump flesh held firmly between thumb and forefinger, a few long fine hairs on the broadest whitest part. Smooth and soft and secret lining where other hairs intrude from other sources - darker, coarser. A crease separating the leg from the rest of the body, a crease that changes character as the leg is used for different things, a soft crease when I am sitting, a mysterious crease when I am lying with one leg curled to my stomach, no crease at all when I am walking, but creased again when running, sometimes. A taut surface when held back, a valley between bulges when not. A leg slimming gradually to a knotted center where the bones assert themselves. A hard hairy hilltop, then a wrinkled old topography flattened into valleys. A leg that swells again, harder this time, smooth again, with a neatly turning strength of its own, a leg that is straight in front and soft-hard in back, flat then rounded, a leg that finally gives way to ankle and foot, the working parts detached from pleasure places above. The bony not so pretty skeletons of motion, fleshed only around the ankle bones, arched over the instep and finally twice in touch with the earth.

Each major time unit is brought to a close by orogeny, also called revolution. Disturbance, disruption, disintegration, under pressure. Even the strongest rocks may develop fractures. Deep decay and rotting of igneous and metamorphic rocks, from blocks to egg and sphere shapes. Water entering into union with minerals. Metamorphic rocks have undergone kneading and shaping, baking and shaking, shale turning to slate when split by cleavage, by slippage, during the process. Slate when struck sharply rings metallically. Clay comes in all colors. Playing the geomorphic role of a weak rock, staring at each other but not speaking until finally. A poetic geology to take back to the red hills, white clay to merge as pink. Isolated submarine mountains, the ocean floor pulled apart here, causing a rift, a certain cruelty. Alone is better I say. Then stop the invasion. If you see two scorpions together they are either making love or one of them is being eaten. Aries energy stepped back into the earth. My rock, your mesas. Ice needles pry apart joint blocks, tremendous pressures and bare high cliffs fall off into conical forms, especially in dry climates. Niches, shallow caves, rock arches, pits, cliff dwellings. Come now. Yes/No. In deserts, flash floods and earthflows, mudflows result from the inability of the dry land to permeate the perma frost. Shrinking and swelling. Given sufficient time, barriers can be broken down and new topographies arise. An unbridgeable gulf does not exist between organic and inorganic matter.

Drift, and erratic boulders are ascribed to mineral richness, to the action of great waves, but women’s tides told in the caves refute such theories. Play pale beyond. In a climate warmer than that we warned each other, islands separated from ice cover by a wide expanse of ocean, foregoing clubs for quieter power, fleshed fat and knowing. Warm interglacial leaves, closer to the fires, hands in a ring, shadows on the ceilings, circles drawn at dusk, footsteps from below. The occasional peculiar transportation of boulders in a manner not in harmony with what we see ice doing at the present time. But little girls are crafty. Our laughter pits the ocean floor. Echoing with pebble talk, scratched on anemones. Walls curving inward toward us. No windows. Pictures nonetheless. Melted between sisters in collision. Only global catastrophes could have brought about that smoothness. Only torrential rains, wet hair, wet cheeks. Each other. Barren stone and fragmented debris stops here, swept back while lakes and valleys are dug out by other women. Each a specialist in her field. What generates the enormous forces that bend, break and crush the rocks in mountain zones? What indeed. Women’s cataclysmic work, traced by fingers in the meteoric dust. Giving birth to each other. Excessive.

Stepping down and out. Someone else can move into this house. It looks o.k. from the outside but the inside needs some work. I only regret how long it took to get down those stairs to the basement. Overhead the pretty flowered curtains make wavered patterns on the sunny floor. A tomato is rotting fuzzily in the icebox drawer and other closets capture other odors, other faults. Under the bed dust gathers roses smell acrid. The sheets at the hamper’s bottom were stained last winter, not since. l’ve opened the windows but not the doors. It’s all yours, if you want it.

Nesting fantasies. I am high in the tallest tree in the world and it sways in the wind. Exhilarating, precarious. I cling to my egg which is disguised as the sea. When the fish hatches I swim through the air until I find a cave, brown, humid, and grainy, where after a night with the boulder another egg is laid, this one transparent. l’m happy watching the beginnings of a new dream. It sometimes has petals, sometimes blades. One morning the walls are opaque and that’s that. Dead leaves turn to stone and I would leave but for the field of snakes that writhes beyond the entrance.

Shuttered. Unhinged. Falling off the roof. A nice white clapboard house with a soft green lawn, lace curtains at the windows, roses on a trellis over the door, the old fanlight sparkling when the light hits it. We need a very long time to move up the flagstone walk. In the process a war takes place, peace reigns, men land on the moon and women defend it, black blankets of oil are thrown across birds’ coffins and the sea stinks. Still the little house remains, the sun always dappling its freshly painted walls, the sound of piano scales twinkling delicately behind the curtain of warmth. When we reach the door we are exhausted, gray, crippled, and in pain. The doorknob, though brilliantly brass, is cold to our touch and the door sticks. It takes our last strength to open it and throw ourselves across the threshold onto what should be a rosy hearth but is instead a deep dark well, the bottom of which, at this telling, we have not reached.

3.

For reasons of their own, women are suspicious of diving and frown on their menfolk going down. D—, who has starred in several underwater films, has never received a fan letter from a woman. -Jacques Cousteau We are already down there. We have already gone down, our breasts bumping the boulders struggling to rise. Our menfolk don’t know where to send the fan letters. Can dive, but not delve. Perhaps far down are boundaries between layers of water not obvious at the surface of the sea and quite independent of surface phenomena. Not just still waters. Rapture of the depths. At a town called Headtide there is an old white church unconsciously marking with its spire the spot where the Sheepscot River, short and wide, a tidal estuary, comes to an end in a stony brook and then goes underground. The term tidal wave is loosely applied. Some rivers braid long plaits of sand with thinning streams, and others — always full, muddy and sated — lag in fat banks. Tides are most marked when the sun is nearest the earth. Tides thigh tickling, oozing over the edges and hummocks, a band of foam, making liquid land. Creeps up me toward immersion. Hold your waters. Making waves, seeing red. I flow she flows we flow. Lunar and solar tides coincide, are fully cumulative only twice each lunar month. While fans unfold, snap shut, and leave the flowers no escape. Underwater, irregularities rise and, cursing, fall. Two or more wave patterns at the same place and time. There can, however, be independent waves. And long rivers pass through different landforms like changing lovers. Impatiently cutting gorges, willing waterfalls and rapids to flatness. Unfamiliar bodies hurled at each other. Beneath the rumbling, boulders lurk and lurch, needing a pool.

My traveling dreams are washed in foreign waters. In one I swim along a beach. The water is warm and the same pale blue as the sky — bleached but not burning. Behind me swims a large black dog and before me floats a group of exotic birds, brilliant pink feathers wet but still light, raised above the water in a tangle of wings. The end of the beach is distant; all sand, no rocks or trees in sight. My swimming is leisurely but purposeful. In another dream I wake alone and rush to find my lover. He is in the bathtub and I yell desperately at him: Did I sleep alone last night? Did I sleep alone last night? Another night, my child, my lover and I are going to see a lighthouse through a swamp. The waterway is not very wide. Trees hang dense over the edges but in the center where we swim it’s blue, unshaded. A long trip to make boatless, but we are swimming, accompanied at times by a fat friend. l’m not struck by the fact that we are swimming so much as by the length of the trip, not tired so much as a little bored. Once again the water is tepid, body temperature, lulling. The lighthouse when we get there is on a broader bay, still inland, mountains in the distance. There is some talk of leaving and returning in the afternoon. But there isn’t time.

The waters broke with no warning. Lie still, pretend while it crests. Above our caves the divers’ forms pass dimly, unaware. Destructive advances of the sea upon the coasts have two distinct origins: dreams like sunwarmed flats when the tide comes in very slowly, visibly; earthquakes and storms. Neither related to the tide, and often not actually waves. Floating, I am a fleshy layer between sea and sky. Why go down? Letters melt and corals build. Why go down and not feel the moon in the pit of your stomach? Or hear ripples whisper on the floor? The ocean’s bedrock blurred. Unexpected, the cold and purifying northern channels. With no warning, water on the brain, the belly, breast and buttock. Internal waves stained pink affecting everything below above. Doesn’t hold water, that’s all. Divers ring their bells but fail to reach us, cannot pierce the bubbles that contain them. And we are already down there, friendly, calm, constructing small places in which to wait, making room for others, settling in, exchanging disguises, rearranging caves and mountains, waiting until they stop pouring oil on the waters, till they stop throwing rocks, sinking ships, turning our tides.