After Matthew Sweeney's 'The Volcano'
A few days after I met you
off the ship we walked to a quiet spot in the park and you told me all about
your life in Europe. I cannot say for sure how long we sat there but as the sun set I remember watching your hands work in rotation as you described how limestone is formed. I laughed away some tension because
you must have said layers a dozen
times before you said that those layers were layers of sediment that compressed
into stone. Then you cupped your hands
into what I saw as a heart but what you saw as stone and
you tipped that stone onto its edge and onto its face to represent its three
bedding planes for building: natural-bedded, edge-bedded, face-bedded. You had earned enough money to get us off the
island and the rest would go towards the stone we would use to build a house. The moment you said that, you clapped your hands together in prayer and promised that it would be the
softest, creamiest stone anyone across the water could ever hope to see. You said you would find a way of getting the
stone here and build me a house in the way that the way a people called The Normans
did, with a round entrance arch with a moulding so full of zig-zags that it
would make me dizzy every time I walked beneath it. We then sat in silence for five or maybe ten
minutes because we could both tell by the way the drones were whizzing and
twitching and spluttering around the peak that the world watched and waited
from the comfort of their soft limestone beds.
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