the tablets of my tribesmen taught me: truth is buried deep, and shallow is the shoveler who lays down to wail and weep when his digging into destin[ed]a[c]tion strikes a stubborn stone; the bold barehearted know that even boulders break before their burrow-boring bones.
so when my darling aerling dropped me, i didn’t brush the dust from my shirt; right where i’d made landfall i reached down into the dirt. i couldn’t sing, i reminded myself, as i turned my hands to spades–my sed[im]entary speech too rough, all full of grit and gravel. so, since my vow couldn’t be something i voiced, it’d have to be something i made–something solid and still, but which yet could be filled with a spirit of resonantravel.
so i dug and drilled into that hill; molded, carved, scraped, and shaped, and [s]cored. i bored down through the layers of the land, branched out and circled back, coaxed every crack into a corridor, a cavern, a chthonicathedral, and the mantra of my mining was her name. the more i hollowed out, the fuller it (and i) became, until i held its every meaning in my marrow and muscle and meat. then the earth began to echo what my mindesire intended; imperfect patterns crystallized to form, fissures melted and moved and [a]mended, and the underground around me pulsed with my heart’s every beat.
my architectonic became home to the sonic–and the earthrumdrumming wouldn’t be an instrument alone. the last of my work was with the skyfacing stone: of the hill i made a head–eyebrow and nose, half-buried ears, unblinking upturned eyes . . . the first small inward tunnel became a mouth, and i opened it wide, wide enough to catch the wind and draw it deep inside.
if i learned anything up there in that groundless, cloudfloored place, it’s this: that air cannot resist the chance to fill an empty space. down in the depths i’ve dreamed are pipes in plenty, placed and planed with careful plans, and they’ll play by breeze’s funneled breath a piece too perfect to entrust to trembling hands. rushing through the rifts, the zephyr, resonant, will run, seeking every slitted slideway, every keyholed lock. a sonata of the stones will sound there, far from the skybound sun–a subterranean symphony, a rondo of the rocks.
i am my work; this hill is my face, these caverns my lungs, this underworld whistling my voice. i stand in my mouth, taste of clouds still on my tongue, waiting for the wind to make her choice.