deep time liturgy

they rinsed us from you & we came to
beneath harvest of smoke & our tools

of part memory, part dream & the dead
where they slept beneath our quilts

the peat bog will not forget, so holds
a dropped awl & still-opened hand

of at least one distant ancestor
having never met

dream leaves its memory
on the raw side of hide

& we gathered foxglove
at eventide from hills that bore

its crash, folding fields
to stitch a robe for moons

to outlast where we held the flood
until it remembered us

by settling remains in the moss
of that moor

where only the listening
from here on out is left & now

the feathered chest-dweller
coughs beneath the ribbed rafters

& we wait with low hum of estuarine mud
in our mouths

where round howls
too sharp to keep where

she gathers them
& us

still holding
that flood

by ripple marks in stone
her song remembers

the weight of our collected
bones to whisper back

o water,
where did your flood
last end?