The chalk man is only a marker
for the dark man that lives beneath.
Who sleeps all day under his skin of grass
the slow heat beat of the earth unheard.
At night bones of flint and fossil
raise him up into the sky,
his vortex of silver hair fragments into stars.
The holding dark, when all is quiet.
An obsidian web, flecked with frost
whose silken threads hold
me with all the strength of steel.
Enfolded in a galaxy of spinning stillness
that goes back to before I began.
That does not ask anything of me, other than to be
until time and space dissolve
into liquid thought, a river of silvery fish
swimming me down sleep’s waterfall.
And in my sleep I dream his centre
the slow heart beat of the stars,
A galaxy curling in a spiral like an ammonite,
unfragmenting the fragmented light.
