When I tell you, the man who lives on those hills
is made of the same limestone ‒ grey, white karst ‒
he stands on; the same rock that butts through the thin
grass cover of his fields; that is the material, he and his
forefathers, back to neolithic times, used to construct
the labyrinthine network of walls thrown, like a fisherman’s
net, onto the western landscape; it’s not a poetic conceit.
I have seen him standing in spring-limpid sunlight,
extending upward, undifferentiated from the bedrock; legs and
arms outstretched, trellised by briar and blackthorn, and
the language of that place, in a script of stonechats, robins and
chaffinches, rewriting itself over and over across his body.
I have seen him weather as limestone weathers, an outcrop
indistinguishable from the others; with the flight of sky above,
the rolling earth beneath; he, on that interface, also remains
undisturbed and unchanged. I have seen that the flow of water has
shaped him to his place; the hindrance that might have been,
smoothed now to a belonging, to a brotherhood of stone.
