Douglas Van Gundy

Plate Tectonics

	I am so tired
	of the silent,
	passionless coupling
	and uncoupling of bodies,
	the weak exhausted sighing,
	the slide of slow continents
	against or across one other,
	hardly touching.

	What I miss is collision,
	the unexpected lurching that comes
	with the fusing of two independent bodies,
	the thrusting up of mountains where before
	there was only grasslands, the draining
	of vast inland seas, their contents left gasping
	on the mudflats,
	the metamorphosis of the very structure of the landscape.
	Not just a new hill here
	or an altered river-chanel there,
	but the transformation through heat
	and pressure
	of grey common limestone
	into blackest marble.