Experimental

Lithophile

                      For A. P. Cox

Holy schistosity! Minerals, alignment into planar surface

created through metamorphic processes generally

will produced by orogeny, cleavage & orogeny, running

my hand up (up is good) your thigh, large igneous provinces

make heaves and rumps of lava loads of lava spilling

out balling over itself

        Mountain building even then slip

        over each other, quartz sausages

        stretched one end, compressed

        the other, shattered over millions

        of years into pieces then soft

        rock to encapsulate between

        white veins bulge within darker

                                        boudinage

ductile lithographic thinning, dip & strike a measurement

& record the deformation, how the land sways over its bed

crystalline structure, building blocks bricks and it is strong:

something we look for.

I spend the summer mapping:

to find geological faults, folds and fissures

to determine the age, angle and arbitrariness

the plunging trends of bedding planes

record the deformation

as i get older i begin to piece

myself together puzzlelike

mapping my formation

pushing against grating sometimes

give in and forcing up a

mountain range.

Deep in the dike of white quartz: a vein

no longer flowing or carrying nutrients but hard, crystalline

certainly, I would like to think of poetry as xenolithic; sailing

igneous and lonely in a sea of murky magma, enlightened

solid and hard         permanent                 and demarcating

selected stratum lineations and subsurface topographic trends

Jo Hateley