You always washed artifacts <br /> at the kitchen sink, your back <br /> to the room, to me, to the mud <br /> <br />you'd tracked in from whatever <br /> neighbor's field had just been plowed. <br /> Spearpoints, birdpoints, awls and leaf- <br /> <br />shaped blades surfaced from the turned earth <br /> as though from beneath some thicker <br /> water you tried to see into. <br /> <br />You never tired, you told me, of the tangible <br /> past you could admire, turn over <br /> and over in your hand—the first <br /> <br />to touch it since the dead one that had <br /> worked the stone. You lined bookshelves <br /> and end tables with them; obsidian, <br /> <br />quartz, flint, they measured the hours you'd spent <br /> with your head down, searching for others, <br /> and also the prized hours of my own <br /> <br />solitude—collected, prized, <br /> saved alongside those artifacts <br /> that had been for so long lost<br /><br />Claudia Emerson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/surface-hunting/
