PAX GEOLOGICA - Collier
Michael Collier - THE LEDGE

Last night the world's rifts, the ridges
that lie under the oceans, entered my dream,
seams and wounds of creation that spread
and subduct, whose monumental moverment
makes mountains, erupts volcanoes,
and sets continents adrift.

In that peaceful destruction the possessions
Of our house lay scattered on the floor
Like a collection of basalt, glassine,
Brittle from cooling, shaped like pillows
And sheets and columns from the temple
of the world's beginnings.

But out beyond the talus walls, over the caldera's edge,
the earth's manufacture of abyss slipped by
slowly. That was the night's upwelling, and in it
the sheer transparent creatures coalesced,
rafts of stellar luminescence - red, blue, blue---
deep, beyond reach, but in the world.



This poem of Michael's is another of his wonderful musings on the nature, the power, and the magic of how the world works. In many ways, Michael's two poems on this web-site (FATHOM AND LEAGUE) delve into some of the same mysteries and implicit questions that ocean scientists go to sea to try to understand.