The Gradient Stones in the Chapel Yard (Bucolic)

Lyrics

The four o’clock sun lays a thin gold cloth
across the gradient stones.
A patient geology of grief, here in the chapel yard.

From limestone the color of bone-tea
to slate the color of a coming storm.
They lean into each other like old gossips,
their arguments settled by a hundred years of rain.
Illegible histories of Patterson and Goss,
scrubbed clean by lichen and the salt wind.
What they had to say is gone now.
Only the stones remain.

The British Primitives are at their work.
Reverend Gisborne, back in 1794, would have called it 'sequestered peace.'
The goats call it lunch.
The soft, tearing crop of coarse grass.
The smell of damp earth and warm lanolin, rising in the cool air.
A rhythmic, thoughtful sound.

And this, the dictionary tells us, is bucolic.
A tilted stone.
A chewing goat.
The long, slow shadow on the chapel wall.
A word too large and round
for such a small, perfect thing.

And there, the children.
Bouba and Kiki, collecting evidence of a single afternoon.
A buttercup, a spot of captured sun.
A head of clover, for luck it doesn't know it has.
A daisy, for a chain that will not be made.
Pressed flat between the pages of Kiki’s logbook,
next to his careful diagrams of tidal flow.

A hundred years from now, who reads these names?
Who finds this flower, a paper ghost between the numbers?
The archive is not the point.
The gathering is the point.
The quiet, earnest work of a Tuesday.
A pastoral scene, they call it.
As if a scene could be held, or owned.

And this, my dears, is bucolic.
A tilted stone.
A chewing goat.
The press of a flower on a waiting page.
A word too large and round
for such a small, perfect thing.

The notebook closes.
A soft click.
The cropping of the grass continues.
And then, just the wind.