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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here
 

Treasure hunters


They took spoons that gleaned their concave grins,
stone-carving of an unnamed goddess,
the impossibility of understanding
language after lovemaking,
and the understanding
that a leaf on the scrim of river
could be more precious than a lung of molten gold

—then they named it silver
and mynah, after the throated bird,
the word without gilt in its broad broken O;
they named it money,
music, forcefield, inhalation, snow.

Of course they were not to be trusted. Hunters never are.
Their father (first one to lick memory off his fingers as if it were spilled wine)
could not walk past a rock without prying it up,
without crouching down to peer dentist-like
..........into the dark-open below.

....................Like their father, they knew
..............................what is desired
shifts under the feet
..........of a faithless generation.

They knew the word in plate tectonics
to describe the precise moment
when a single land mass
yawns into seven.

....................But is there such a moment
....................to describe what they found
....................when they hunted for you?

A line has no beginning.
A sigh, no friend.
..........The fish has no eyelids.
....................A ball of twine, no end.

And had there been lightning
in your body, and thunder
in your step-even then, could you
have resisted?
....................Would you have wanted
not to see yourself
upside down in silver,
....................suspended
..............................from a scrolled handle,
the world lipped around your shoulder,
dipping into soup?