Notes About The Poem
There is always a price for true peace, and it often requires the total surrender of the self. t
Becoming the Hill
The southern slope kept a secret—
a slight tear where a shadow learns to grow.
I felt the pulse that pulled me in,
past where the daylight breaks,
down to where the cold, clear water flows.
The entrance wore a veil of living lace,
stretched tight across the limestone seams.
My hand caught the web—snap.
A sound like a severed nerve,
a frantic flight of silk in the dark.
A thousand eyes of jet* looked back at me,
skittish guardians shifting in the bend.
They sensed the weight I carried,
the heavy, hollow ache of winter’s end,
and pulled away into the rock’s silence.
I moved the stone, one by one,
shimmying into the throat of the hill.
Leaving the world of coffee and schedules,
of letters never sent and cold, still rooms,
to trade the sun for the smell of wet flint.
The air grew thick—a history held in breath.
The mountain drank the noise of my life,
the schedules, the fears, the static of days,
until the gravity beneath my feet shifted,
as if the earth were re-calibrating its mantle.
Deep inside, it was not empty.
It breathed in a bioluminescent hum—
walls bleeding a spectral, bruised blue.
A path snaked away, a vein of light
offered by a world that had forgotten me.
The cavern opened—a limestone cathedral.
There, glyphs bled from the stone,
a language of weight, of tectonic patience,
etched by hands that knew the cooling of the crust.
The "Litany of Compression"—the agony of eons.
The "Silent Watchers" warned of the breathers,
the map of veins reaching toward the mantle.
I knelt in the dirt, finding the charcoal
the ancients left for the next ghost to arrive.
I did not write a name, or a date, or a prayer.
I traced the suture of my own breath
into the wall, a frantic, uneven line.
My body began to chime with the cave.
Limbs turning to cold, heavy mineral;
skin thickening, pores sealed with dust.
I was lifted to the ceiling, a slow drift,
tethered to a sister-spire of quartz,
the two of us holding up the dark,
holding up the sky of the hill.
Outside, the spiders return to their work.
They knit the entrance shut with elastic silk,
weaving the wound of my entry back into stone,
hiding the secret from the reach of the sun.
The hill holds its peace.
And I, finally, have found my own.
* Jet black eyes of 125 spiders
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