Deposits 


 I’ve ducked under dim electric bulbs,

stared through grilles into backless passages,

a long way in under the mountain.



The guide switches off the lights;

space weighs in, light as the heart of a soap-bubble,

a waterfall haunts like an unexamined god.



Pale torch-light finds a row of grinning stalactites;  

while he slips in ‘metamorphic,’ ‘quaternary,’ 

we picture floods and volcanoes; 



he names a tiny fern

lodged high up in the darkness,

enumerates species that left bones here



and I think about a Stone Age child 

awake in an echoing labyrinth

while the family breathes round her.