A far sleep rests in these people,
that is near, and all. The look
every father wears: not to know the deep need,
the simple salt, the body’s lying call.

Every season here droops
into its shabby nest. At the touch of stone
the immensity becomes your own: gods, fathers, sons,
binding into earth, becoming one and centre.

Every man, every beast,
trapped, deaf in his own sleep.
Only the wind you hear, that scallops
the silence of a whole birth, speaking

from the skies where nothing moves:
the horizon black, motionless; the old hills
which define memory, stars of myth whose surfaces
sling silence. And yet what weaves into sleep is not false.

And there’s no point in checking the time.
No point in crossing that ceremonial river
of a hundred thousand lies.
You merely wait, listening, pinned to the stone.