The weather in Geneva
1816 summer they’re out on the lake
it’s cold colder than England a cold wind
just one sail and a rudder fighting the blast
no forecast sky a coal-black seam
water becoming wilderness as it thrashes
here with her husband and friends
she can’t speak
spray spits in her face they curse God
she sees slabs of exposed mountain
outcrop where a single bolt
causes rock to shout I am alive
they don’t know about an eruption
in another place in a dark hemisphere
enough smoke and ash to cover Europe
afterwards indoors in a country of rain
they will build a fire and each tell a story
Byron will write ‘The Darkness’ and Mary
will begin hers with an evocation of ice
naked newborn Man among the crags
lacking name memory tribe justice
who craves in a cold century
as she writes she prays he’ll never be
Message to an off-world
after an epoch of sleep the alert shock
saying to yourself afresh I am I
think of earth the first time walking through grass
fine hairs on your arms prickled by scents
breathe remember
not my voice but an older transmission
how it leaked a form of moisture
into the growing brain
that first shaping you as you are
let it show you by the flickering it holds
as you remember how calcite
moved like the moving flanks of giant cattle
stone becoming fluid in ochre charcoal
saliva drawing lion-faces in a frieze
here in your new Late Pleistocene
smell the limestone damp of underfoot mud
feel your breath flickering on rock
record without such beauty no survival