Headland

Like stone, the body carries at its core,
in its textures, a history of becoming
and erosion. Here, limestone covers
dark silt from volcanoes; there, scar tissue
of the intolerable: fissured rock plates.
Time eats deeper into some lesions;
others fill with the detritus of life —
barnacled bones, void mussels and eggs —
or life itself: the spray-soaked, singing nest,
bronze-eyed skink, a clam winking at the sun
while keeping its counsel. The wind adds to,
strips clean, skin of rock, scours creaturely flesh.
The sea, too, is theft and gift and fusion,
its cliffs storeyed with aeons of drowning, spawning.