|
CLAUDIA EMERSON
Surface Hunting
You always washed artifacts
at the kitchen
sink, your back
to
the room, to me, to the mud
you'd tracked in from whatever
neighbor's
field had just been plowed.
Spearpoints,
birdpoints, awls and leaf-
shaped blades surfaced from the turned earth
as
though from beneath some thicker
water
you tried to see into.
You never tired, you told me, of the tangible
past
you could admire, turn over
and
over in your hand—the first
to touch it since the dead one that had
worked
the stone. You lined bookshelves
and
end tables with them; obsidian,
quartz, flint, they measured the hours you'd spent
with
your head down, searching for others,
and
also the prized hours of my own
solitude—collected, prized,
saved
alongside those artifacts
that
had been for so long lost. 
return to top
|
