THE CARVING OF THE UNSEEN

 

The Carving of the Unseen  

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It strikes at undetermined points,

A quiet ambush along life’s sprawling map—

Not pinned to any tidy grid,

No predictable latitudes or longitudes,

But in the wild, uncharted stretches,

The crooked bends and shadowed valleys

Where the compass spins, bewildered.

The moment—or moments—arrive unbidden,

A sudden flare in the dusk of routine,

When that person, place, or thing

Slips past the skin,

Past the ribs,

And chisels itself into the stone

Deep within the cave of the heart—

A cavern vast, echoing,

Where time’s hands tremble to erase.  

It’s a mystery, this etching,

No heralded cause to herald its coming—

Not a thunderclap or a prophet’s cry,

But a whisper threading through the ordinary,

A glance caught in a crowded room,

The scent of rain on a forgotten porch,

A trinket clutched in a trembling palm.

Conditions shift, seasons tumble—

Spring’s bloom withers to autumn’s ash,

A strong gust of wind might howl through,

Ripping leaves from their moorings,

Whistling with the speed of years unleashed—

Yet what’s carved holds fast,

Unyielding,

A glyph burned into the rock,

Anchored against the storm’s wild sweep.  

These marks become history’s keepers,

Archived in the heart’s shadowed vaults,

Not as fleeting ink on fragile pages,

But as runes scored into granite—

Vivid, unblurred by the years’ slow grind,

Undeclared by time’s relentless tide.

They glow there,

A constellation of what was,

Each star a memory refusing to dim—

The laugh that cracked the silence of a gray dawn,

The streetlamp’s halo on a midnight walk,

The weight of a hand brushing yours,

A moment too brief to name,

Yet too deep to dissolve.

No decay can touch them,

No dissolution soften their edges—

They stand, eternal sentinels,

Guarding the cave’s sacred dark.  

Some arrive in chaos,

A collision of chance and ache—

The stranger who paused to share a cigarette,

Smoke curling like a promise in the cold,

The cliffside where waves roared their fury,

Salt stinging your lips as you stood, awed.

Others creep in soft, unnoticed,

A kitchen table scarred by years of meals,

The creak of a floorboard under bare feet,

A song half-remembered,

Its notes threading through a quiet afternoon.

No matter the spark,

They lodge there,

Taking root in the stone’s cool embrace,

Defiant against the winds of forgetting,

A gallery of the soul’s quiet rebellions.  

And so they remain,

Through the drift of decades,

Through the erosion of lesser things—

The petty quarrels that fade to dust,

The plans unmade, the days unclaimed.

What’s etched endures,

A testament to the unpredictable alchemy

Of where we’ve been, who we’ve loved,

What we’ve held when the world turned away.

The heart’s cave stretches wide,

Its walls a tapestry of these moments,

Each carving a story,

Each line a truth time cannot unwrite—

Vivid as the day they struck,

Solid as the earth beneath,

A history whispered in stone,

Forever archived,

Forever ours,

Beyond the reach of wind or ruin.