Stella Luna

This could be Neptune or Pluto
a planet of the imagination
the granite land has blood and voices
blemishes and beauty
each rock picked like a cranberry
one after another and another and another
until they were all lifted lugged and placed just so
and a walled Grates Cove garden knit in careful geometry was made

some threw the rocks into a pile that grew into a line of fences
some were architects and wily mathematicians
shifting the right rock for the exact space
double thick blocks as tight as chimney
miles of rocks wind up and down the hills
a web of gossamer stories
the eroded sculpture of lives
on a slab of Avalon back

walls and gardens and lives lived
vegetables blooming from the captured land
made with caplin and kelp and sweat in July’s perfect sun
listen
people’s voices still speak and sing here
their craft a rocky jigsaw puzzle that now is art
they are the marrow landscape
the weavers and tellers
and the rocks yield to the voices
and the white cotton candy bog flowers and searching lichen
cling with all their might to what pitiful soil is offered
seeds always clinging like grapnels
seeking miracles

the crusty grey lichen crackles underfoot
like splits shouting in a stove
but there is a gully here
rimmed by mauve watercolour orchids
and quartz veined hills startling in the racing fog
in creamy Avalon light

this place is not a history lesson of the dead
and there
on the rising finger of land
in the last drill above the granite sea washed teeth
is a barrel man hauling off his red shirt
and a woman named Stella in a billowing summer dress
laughing and waving life onwards

II

the mountain shadows stain the moon, Stella Luna,
and they will lie together tonight under the witness sky
sail again on the tide running beneath their lives
lifting them on the swell
in a landscape of walled heartbeats

still