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Avebury awi-spek, winged from buried (egg nose stuffed eyes holes in the chalk ridge of sinal bones rushed down back roads’ upland grass wind weaving snakelike through. old English words: the land, the land, man’s life like the life of cereals. woman’s too. bring to this place the line of a life (palm says it), motive in currents of changing weather, angst, cold for this time of year – & small, toy pistol in one hand, cupped, & sheltered by the pelvic thrust of rock, jumps, gotcha mom! as if to fix it (sine), that jubilant ego in the face of stone, of wind flocking grey wethers still gathered like (but not the same, not these) sarsens now in place, immutable from long time back. & front, weathered yes, in folds acquiring character we read in, clothed & prickling now along the hairless spine, a line meeting a circle, two in one so huge (small hill) barely visible at grass view, red windbreaker fleck a sea of green & climb some moat in his imagination scaled he calls me to: come & get me, the, all-powerful tickle, gulp, wriggle gulping in the whole world hugged in ecstatic limit, breath’s. nothing still, no duration now (a line) creeps through fields of (waves of) renewed green, cloud, light. what was it they got? craniums & long bones in long barrows, construction tools from 4000 years back, antler picks, rakes, & some ox shoulderblade shovels. what perspective from that elevation? matrix of chalk block walls arranged in the pattern of a spider’s web around & over a mound of turves, grass still pliable though brown in colour … beetles … flying ants with their wings showed them buried late July of 2660 B.C. why? The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt / 9 the line hypothesized druid lore (in Christian times), today a collective need to endure winter to spring, when from his knoll…/ the Serpent will come from his hole/ on the Brown Day of Bride, singing wave on wave emerging – & at centre, earth, only earth. narrative is a strategy for survival. so it goes – transformative sinuous sentence emerging even circular, cyclic Avebury, April-May leaps winged from buried. sheds lives, laps, folds, these identities, sine: fold of a garment/ chord of an arc (active misreading). writing in monumental stones, open, not even capstone or sill, to sky (change ). she lives stands for nothing but this longstanding matter in the grass, settled hunks of mother crust, early Tertiary, bearing rootholes of palms. they bring us up, in among stone-folds, to date: the enfolded present waits for us to have done with hiding-&seeking terrors, territories, our obsession with the end of things. how hug a stone (mother) except nose in to lithic fold, the old slow pulse beyond word become, under flesh, mutter of stone, stane, steiing power. 10 / Rivering ...

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