Pax Geologica

by Michael Collier

Last night the world's rifts, the ridges
that lie under the oceans, entered my dream,
seams and wounds of creation that spread
and subduct, whose monumental moverment
makes mountains, erupts volcanoes,
and sets continents adrift.

In that peaceful destruction the possessions
Of our house lay scattered on the floor
Like a collection of basalt, glassine,
Brittle from cooling, shaped like pillows
And sheets and columns from the temple
of the world's beginnings.

But out beyond the talus walls, over the caldera's edge,
the earth's manufacture of abyss slipped by
slowly. That was the night's upwelling, and in it
the sheer transparent creatures coalesced,
rafts of stellar luminescence - red, blue, blue---
deep, beyond reach, but in the world.