On a day too drowned for all but raindrops to dance
we sink our hands in steep mud-banks
at the mouth of the secret site
shown to you by stones through dreams:

The flourish of your fingers, the muddening crescents
moving red moons through yellowed nails,
your fallen half-moon mouth plays, saying
Locate the living floor
in every layer,
the quartz petals dropped 
from perpetual blossoms,
jasper reddened into edges, knife blades;
stone-scratched hands listen to glistening clay.

Dancing bare hands dig past sodden lifelines.
Reach the burnt orange roots:
for a moment hold
a hand rooted here 10,000 years before
Before
the fingers let go,
they leave the task in your careful, callused grasp—

Re-member
Before this house stood here, stones rising from every sodden surface,
Before the air force commander reigned over the land-ridden from this perch,
Before the foundation for the barn built by William Penn’s descendants,
Before this before, a Lenape family lived here,
(After the before of the bacterial cloud’s silent cry:
unio mystica in torrential rain of unknowing),

and at four a.m. deep in the black mouth-dark spoken between
day and night someone called out deep from underneath
and showed you to the site
where the jasper arrow pointed down
at the place we need to see sacred again (as it’s always been)—
and as you sweep the clay so carefully from your spade
and touch the still sharp shards,
the life is in your hands

In Other Words (An Encore)
the visioning man (hidden away) plunged his hand down
through red clay, fervently reaching out of time
while the dead man (a seer) reached up through wet red clay
and their hands held in between—
the sacred space,
outside of time,
to which the Mad prophets have been shown many ways.