Читать книгу How to Be Eaten by a Lion - Michael Johnson - Страница 11

The Volcanologist’s Lament

Living things know the sound of their hour.

The stormchaser knows the wind calling,

the eye’s silence before the hammerfall.

For the hellfighter, the sudden company

of fire, oil turned to tongues that lick the dust

with flame. For rockhounds the earth’s

seismic bitchings, stones tumbling from Earth’s

molten bruise. In all our hours

can one find more haunting a thrall than the dust

and shockwall closing over those calling

for help? Such images inevitably accompany

us into the grave: the fall

of lavasilk, magma’s chaotic freefall

through the sky’s strata to reclaim the earth.

A nightly pillar of fire to accompany

us, a pillar of cloud by day—what ashen hour

could pass without some stony lord calling

gravely from the depths? This sweet dust.

They say we are raised from dust.

The honey-heft of all the fruit fallen

in the orchards, the soil calling

commands of ferment and rot, the earth

reclaiming all. Everything is the hour

of his supper. We are his company,

his very wine and bread. We are a company

of fools for mistaking the holiness of dust.

Land, property, certainly. Not an hour

of these passes unbartered in the rise and fall

of markets and monies, but the earth

goes unheard. That lithic heart calling

its pulse up through the plates, calling

its wrath through the faults: I keep company

with gods, why do you not listen? This earth

is such a terrible loneliness. Built of dust,

they say. I’m just a man, bound to fall.

Why care without another to share the hours?

O firestone, I’ve unearthed nothing. O enemy hour,

when comes calling my friend in the fall,

my company into the country of dust?