I learned of gentleness through riverbed rocks

Ritual undressings

Finding scars like seams of quartz:

white scyth

you couldn't see.

I saw you in a riffle on the Calder

a sheet of penny brown.

Learned your landscape with one hand

submerged;

wrist split the light.

I felt the river warp its course to absorb

the sinking of a limb.

I grasped as it forked, fingers

beckoned

whorls of silt.

I feared, at first, to disturb that moss-stitched rock

Or serpentine stone of

red-orange rust, which rose through

gold rings -

shattered the sun.

I heft slabs up along the banks, spume-storms rose

around bone-chilled ankles.

I stacked these sturdy structures;

with cairns

built you a home.

We brooded on kindred things. Houses that

crumbled around you, that

fortified around me.

Stone-sure

I saw you there:

I came to tenderness through riverbed rocks.

Your mother called them hazel.