Erosion

Photo by Blackland, 2014

The land-shaper here is always water, whether we’re
in drought or not. Paths are scoured, or washed away
when it steps down from the sky. We’re too far from
an ocean for any maritime god to lay a claim—when
land’s reshaped around us, it’s the sky god flinging his
shovels of rain who does it. Even a seep can become a
crow-bar in winter, jimmying ice-blades between layers
of lime and chert, cleaving them into sharp brittle flakes,
some with the bones of past seas showing, some mute,
too shy to speak, but dense and siliceous, a knapper’s
delight. Further along: flint nodules washed out from an
undercut ledge, steel-gray, fine-grained. They’ve been
tumbled one against the other at each flood until their
conchoidal fractures lost every serrated edge; now they
drift to sleep, dream of rain falling on their gravel bed.