XLVI by Federico Federici
Treading on limestone and slime,
tangles of seaweeds, up hill from
black sand-banks and pebbles, with
the pace of hunter on the bear path,
on the clay bed of mammoths unseen.
The sea-warning cadence has been
sibilant for ages, sea vowels dries out on
shale, across woven estuaries of ice-veins,
shoals skimmed over frontiers of dark.
A low wing-bone hanging from a hollow
bough: all things seems to weep at dusk,
all sirens’ calls and gales. Seagulls and seals
quickens up steps to their water dens
at the brink of the well, the karst hell
of stones which all birds sing within.
