Half moon and half moon, stone and bone. Remnant and garment. It may have been a processional way, it may have been a game trail, it may have been a stony embellishment. The road, the way out, the method. From one porousness to another, some circles are built for feasting and ceremony for the living, and some are reserved for the dead. And in the middle the living and the dead co-habitate. Blue and green half moons in the mine shaft, their skulls. I am very sleepy; my hands are aging. Someone has broken the moon in half—one portion each for the dead and those who never mention them.

*

Mention them, indemnity. Aging polygonal chambers of stone carved out by hands. Skulls, my own dear cleared out skull. Co-habituating, condensing and hardening, becoming a metal. Dead things making circles, as the owls do with their necks, and making their eyes into hard bright stones. Hodos: anode, cathode, diode. A stony embellishment. Garment of soil, bone out of place, the center of the vertebrae thick and hard as a fingernail. Bone a henge, stone a path, grave a passage.

Probably already defleshed, these stones. Unto whom the eldest parcels are young, and the earth itself an infant. We proceed to the mountain and mark off with boundary stones a large meer. The tombs chamber on in the dark. But each of these early customs have been changed, and with the offer of an open palm, we now employ a new method.

*

A road, sighted along the boundary line: a bit of data. Dark in the hills, one stretches a cord to a point out beyond the fir trees. Merely August, a child playing in the woods slips down a mine shaft, and births a new caution, parents bending to warn their children not to go near the old holes. An infant down the processionary way. Insight, a bit of data: one may form a chamber by levering up a natural slab to create a room beneath, like lifting a tablecloth.

The fishes, too, are hidden from view. If I understand anything, greater wealth now lies hidden beneath the ground than is visible and apparent above ground. Later we will play cards in the garden: the roi, the dame, and a fistful of atouts. And a large part of the earth is still in the urne unto us.

*

Despite swimming in it, we living interpret what the dead have left us only when we must. Ah, to enclose a corridor! Above ground: an open, water-colored road, shining like mother-of-pearl. View the moon, its bit of data in the sky reflected by the stones below, their minor shine of a minor shine.

Stones change and perish but cannot go extinct. The force of the stream strikes the bucket and the mechanism turns on a wheel. Yet this cannot be the whole explanation. Upland fields, lowland fields—his playing could be heard in the most remote summer orchards. Let none forget those men who laid its first foundations, who fell down a chasm and dashed their head on the stones. Pensively, he stopped to stroke his own marble bust.

*

Bust, burn, break, boil. Stones go about their business erecting people. In the orchard cows churn up mist, a horse breaks open a spring with one kick. The whole explanation turns on the position of the summer solstice. A wheel. Extinct already, the adherents of the megalithic faith made something sacred merely by moving it a little ways and dying.

In that earlier millennium, water flowed from one chamber to another. Spiders summit the sterna; the virgin in the crypt is seen weeping one frozen tear. The meer is one hundred and ninety-six square fathoms, and the assayer looks frequently, looks carefully, to prevent injury to the eye, through a slit in the wood.

*

The woods grew up fast and thick. A tear in my one good woolen coat. My sternum suddenly exposed. Another minute out there in that cold and I could have caught my death!

Clouds go down their processionary way. They too are erecting chambered monuments according to some opaque method. Just as garlic, they used to say, overcomes the strength of its enemy, the magnet. Grind garlic into a paste and smear it on one side of the magnet and they say it will go temporarily dormant.

*

Sleeping bones still far outnumber the living. The magnetic plea of the pit. The road to the lake shines a temporary peridot, one hundred and ninety-six square fathoms. Say, have you often been in this part of the country? I have often been in this part of the country. And it remains in the urne unto me.