The Mere Four

by Henry G. Stanton

I’ve finally made it to your hyperborean, your northern granite state; actually, only beyond that dramatic wave of your arm is igneous, all igneous; for example, that immense wall there of quartz potassium feldspar biotite mica a minor component; well, I suppose ignorant, certainly not red, like down where I’m from under; there’s nothing more shameful, though, than the southern red states in this country at this time; no igneous, ig-nee-us, DESERVED OF SHAME, DISGRACE, no, IGNEOUS. So this isn’t a granite ledge I’ve worked myself out upon, chert, where oh, look, right what bird is that chirrup chirrup; no, no, a strata we’re sitting on, chert, CHERT; this wind is brutal SO FAR (dramatic arm waves); HOW down into the valley wild vast stretch of conifers STRETCH OUT OVER, breathtaking beautiful!, MOVE THIS WAY, and there, the inside passage, you can dangle your legs over the edge; that’s the eastern sun producing the angular glint scintillations penumbra from the east, then to the left north; shift your butt south forward and dangle your legs; oh, my God, look at that escarpment, like a huge, brown, wrinkled garrison cap; yes, every kind of thing integrated up here, crumpled together, added around the edges, pushed up, eroded down the Canadian Shield ancient triangular heart of North America North American plate; what? I’m afraid to move forward, DANGLE YOUR LEGS, the western wall against my back bends around there in a horseshoe, and fills all I see to the south, we lean against it west, what is it, the wall feeling safe against my back; crumbly, though; limestone and shale sediments of a shallow warm sea Ordovician; if we had time, we could pick at it and probably find trilobites, what don’t we have time? where are we going? down, are we going down?, here, dangle your legs over the edge; actually, there are the remains of a once-intractable gneiss crumpled up like putty by an irresistible power; over there, its paroxysm associated directly with the orogeny you reference (in these final moments), and the granite that cuts through the nappes is important for calibrating the time of the events, the events of the whole range, huh, what events?; here, it’s a rush (the wind the imminent fall), DANGLE YOUR LEGS; Okay, phew, scary; you shall be meeting some of these old faces, old scars, on the upturned face of the earth; what, lean forward; look down there; OOPs a simple scheme complicated only by the inevitable minor undulations, a geological breakback traverse the anticline, a sine curve split open; ugh, smashed, graven into earth crust, the distorted earth, its ages crushed together.

Henry Stanton's fiction, poetry and paintings appear in 2River, The A3 Review, Avatar, The Baltimore City Paper, The Baltimore Sun Magazine, Kestrel, Outlaw Poetry, PCC Inscape, Pindeldyboz,  Salt & Syntax, SmokeLong Quarterly, The William and Mary Review, Word Riot, and The Write Launch among other publications. 

His poetry was selected for the A3 Review Poetry Prize  and was shortlisted for the Eyewear 9th Fortnight Prize for Poetry.  His fiction received an Honorable Mention acceptance for the Salt & Syntax Fiction Contest and was selected as a finalist for the Pen 2 Paper Annual Writing Contest.