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Weathering // Headlights search and pick out the seamed stone walls / on each side of the island’s narrow road. In Orkney stone, / a crack, a cut and weathered channel, is entry / to the remotest places – vast worlds of howl and murmur / and whistle sounds of storms and secrets / and systems of limitations and faults of love. / Stone is a woman’s fingers on the hand-rail / of an escalator at the Mall, followed / to her hand, to the yearning of her arm, / to eyes that fixed in stare with mine / till I thought her endless limbs would spread across my bed. / But she and I are moving in different directions, / and beyond the tips of her fingers is space, gap, / the gape that populates weathered cracks in stone / with which the wind makes words.