We solicit the metals, propose them from their sleep of ore.

Do this for us, we say. Here is your role. Rejoice, you have an end.

Startled, the words grow tense. In a moment, they may be arches.

Dreams begin to collect: crinkled fables the employers cannot condone, offering hints of hidden seams, infant workings.

Seduced from their natural course, their archaic lethargy, the elements must enter the warped fields of love, the fraught uncertainty of affection.

What lay secret and oblivious under the earth is now exhausted into our form of shelter. Our form of shelter, enchanted from our ignorance, lies secret and oblivious under a translucent earth.

At the terminus of each bond, a profound fatigue adheres: the stress and ruin entailed by all building. The other use for the river, the mine we never dug, love never endured.

The words, aroused from their torpor, open their eyes very wide, with no choice but to be innocent. We gather, and attend. Incapable of fixing the words to our appointed positions, we must watch as they close their eyes, before us, and revert to their natural state, silence.

Crowds of words and crowds of people melt away.

The mine opens and the mine closes.

The poem falls and the poem rises.