Kilocyclical

Quartzite faces,
Tiny numbers,
Count parcels of light:
Reflections in a stone mirror.

Agglomerated ground,
Slick soil’s creep
On a downward slope
Grinds grit on bedrock
Wears away the planet’s bones.

Particles slip.
River sludge drains to ocean.
Deltas on the sea floor fan,
Spread sediment in the deep:
The piled-up, laid-down histories
Of landscape.

Always, light on substance,
Energy’s illustrated form,
Form’s outline in reply,
Moves by each moment
In and out of shadow
Out of time.

Then the pulse,
The throb of star and sunlight
The metered beat of radiance
Every wavelength repeated,
Broken, speeded, broken,
Slowed or scattered.

Then the pulse,
A vein behind the eye
Ratcheted stabs of perception
In the brain behind the vein.

History beneath unsteady earth,
Its slipped surface stratified
In seabed secrecy
Remains unfathomable
To be deciphered on a mountain top
When earth meets
Impossible sky.

But light moves in air,
Energetic dust on the merest wind,
Unphysical, bereft of mechanism,
Only quantum agitation stirs
Eddies on the edge of sight.

Then, futures might come to pass
In the same heartbeat instant:
The eye’s gathering of data,
The sun’s relentlessness,
All our steps not taken,
The unshattered stone.

Unconsolidated, pliable memory
Comes like landmass in the making:
Promisory, nascent, hidden.

Before it,
Forethought, foreboding,
Nothing else.

Foreknowledge only recognized
In the knowledge it becomes.

Nothing else,
Only an inkling.

Initialising