for a few weeks, then put out slight
second leaves, scar-tissue pale as bracts,
bandaged comrades, lending each other lee.
How perilous in one another's V
our lives are, yoked in this yoke:
two men, leaning apart for light,
but in a wind who give each other lee .
IN THE RIF MOUNTAINS
(lVorthern Jkforocco)
Geology set this story down so long ago
it's a wonder it's still legible.
But the stylized hand is still clearly Arabic,
dark against the pale tan tablets of mountainside .
The violence of what's being told is belied
by the formal language of old rock,
as is the case with the later chronicles
written by, and about, smaller convulsions, men.
How shapely the various grammars that record
the brief cycles in which our substance roils and cools.
And the violence in each case is belied
a second time: the elegant calligraphy of rock and quill.
Yet close-to, the running, friable stone,
leached and pitted, no longer looks like writing
but like spotted backs of old geology's hands.
They rest translucent, calm, the dreadful story told
and left here on these slanting tablets
for the tribes that will presently enter.
The tribes enter. They read the rocks as their Homer–
the source of a thousand years of manners,
the model for the heats and seisms
