Fault Lines of a Geographer
by John Barton
how strange to remake the planet in the image of eternal
youth, the continents, shifting, rub
plate against plate, restless
mountains risen under pressure along fault
lines while sudden inlets form at the periphery, released
sighs you track, mapping rivers that, giddy
collapse into them, sweat collecting in the hollows
along your collarbone while you work
things out, the exhilarations
of the day counterbalanced by the weight
you lift above you head—shoulders, thighs, and back
hardening with time into fundament apparently
immutable, chest become the breastplate
of a continent behind which your heart
dreams in a landlocked sea
the planet rescued
from a brain too mindful of the soft
rich clay that houses it, of all that is ground
down and mixed into a grey amalgam
and spread thin, muddying
shallows across which our ancestors will one day stray
recently erect and marking us with indifferent footprints
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ISSN 1494-6114.
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