Calthemite
so earth-creeping a mind
— Sir Philip Sidney
despite all appearances, not
stalactite but some ‘other’
sallied-out
from crushed ribs of
aggregate + cement in perfect (calqued) concretion
being pre-mixed with additive round rebar & set to
brash form hollow museum
of our
collusion with or against
limestone sand gypsum
the pulled-out
streamer gauche with dreams of
making things either better than nature brings forth, or,
quite anew, forms such as never were in nature
this aping thing
built c.1970 by the men
whose signature was their breath was the
concrete cancer
to their silicosis
lungs cracked like old leather
as the leachate
drips bonding
ions to ions, till
crystalline (deposited)
the ceiling turns brogue
with calcite straws
descending like slow exclamations
or rivulets coursing through a throat opened at every angle:
rude uvular tonguing
the dripstone down
in this cavern of our own making
to new
speleotherm, since
our erected wit makes us know what perfection is,
and yet our infected will keeps us from reaching unto it
so crumbles
in the hand
strange counterfeit coarse mimic
calthemite recalling
cave-system:
all that is modern here
slinking back to prehistoric
home of our first writing, or
place we go to
whenever we should want most to leave it
James Coghill has had poems in Blackbox Manifold, Datableed, and Shearsman, among other places. Away from poetry, he works as an SEMH teacher.
