They’ll dig us up in a thousand years And dust off the bone-idle lust: Tripping along the path to the weir Past the bolder-hearted boulders, Down where the agitated sediments Kicked up tea-cup tempests, Stirring sugar sentiments In over-brewed brooding tar pits; But the love-note motes settled finally – Where the boats sit like index fossils, And weathered Wisdom sits weaving A striated riverside history.
They’ll build a quarry one day, And with visceral granite stabs unearth the way To first-date the amour-ammonites; The complex carbohydrates of obsession, Coiled with Fibonacci-time around one central pivot And buried in the strata-upon-stratification; It’s all hidden like crescent moon indents In the palm of a hard clenched fist, Sprung-back and thrown at a louche pacifist, Whose halting hand absorbs the momentum And stores the kinetic electric eroticism In mud-stopped bottle-top artefacts – They’ll dig them up too, one day.
Would they throw it all away? The skeleton of calcified romanticism, Inspirations wrongfully imprisoned In a once elastic-flex ivory ribcage, Now chucked in bone piles up the riverbank, steep.
This footpath has breathed life deep. And sometimes I trip and my feet heart-palpitate, But I don’t want to skip a beat.
© Georgina Barley 2016