Skin Dreaming

Skin is the closest thing to god,

touching oil, clay,

intimate with the foreign land of air

and other bodies,

places not in light,

lonely

for its own image.

It is awash in its own light.

It wants to swim and surface

from the red curve of sea,

open all its eyes.

Skin is the oldest thing.

It remembers when it was the cold

builder of fire,

when darkness was the circle around it,

when there were eyes shining in the night,

a breaking twig, and it rises

in fear, a primitive lord on new bones.

I tell you, it is old,

it heals and is sometimes merciful.

It is water.

It has fallen through ancestral hands.

It is the bearer of vanished forest

fallen through teeth and jaws

of earth

where we were once other

visions and creations.