A compass ball whirls on a winding mountain track,
grasping for earth shellshocked by ages of footsteps
of fire and drought, tires and toes, hooves, coffins
arriving and leaving and finding their way home.
Here I am, she whispers. Here.
I reel. All are her. No one is her. She is everywhere,
blinding force of attraction dismembering me
in each of the directions at once.
No. Here.
I pry out from the crevasses of my compartments
the only maps I have made of this terrain, scarred
with trajectories, detours, abandoned territories.
Spin them around and around in my hands, squint
through their overlays, peel back their palimpsest keys,
fix my gaze on their moving parts.
Or are they? Moving.
Brake.
Break? I will.
No, she says. Slow.
Here.
Here where the drumbeat lives. The bassline
in your temples. Your tongue. Your throat.
Chest gut fingers cunt in your name in your ear.
Its vibration is a magnet. You pivot to face it
every time, before words flee lips before knowing
untangles itself from your bramble.
Before. And after. Here.
I am sick with motion. And yet, she says,
we sway every second to stay standing upright.
Life evolved in the presence of gravity and I
am here. My bones you call ankle they are bearings.
Your muscle I call anchor pulses the push and pull
of bodies echolocating each other through
frequencies of love and they are low.
So low they summon you from below the soil
you scratch into your soles to let the medicine in.
Feel me rhythm you becoming. Not mapping
coordinates but moulding membrane to re-member
how you breathe love through you there and there,
drink the dust of places through our pores,
lie skin to skin with the land and come home.
Sarah Amsler 