Carson Colenbaugh

Love Song Scrawled at Shaking Rock

It floated just above the earth through a sluice
of uncountable centuries, this boulder balanced
neat atop a pinhead protrusion, reposed
so perfectly that eyewitnesses & newspapers
all claim one could budge it with a single pinky

until some time in the late eighteen-hundreds.
We slipped out here to behold its great architecture.
Mass resting sound on stone. Rock squatting daubed in paint,
traversed by brightly written tongues. Ten-thousand years
after ten-thousand years it wobbled to gentle touch,

trembled in the breeze, before one day, and without
much notice it seems, falling ill to gravity’s dull
ubiquitous tug. Every marking we trace brings
our hands together across the great body’s backbone,
which leads us to the beaten ground, to a clearing

downhill where we fly, drawn by the light of its faint creek,
some alluvial glen. The last of its kind:
filled with arrowhead, Carolina buckthorn,
silky dogwood, the tentpole trunks of river birches:
all filtering streetwater down to broader streams,

to rivers. To sea-rest, purling the whole way home
and for one golden second masking that crumbling sound
near-imperceptible, the hunting unstoppable
silence that spreads across all things, sweeping bark & bone
away, settling boulders. Even today, your eyes

outshowing every blackhaw, all this talk of Time,
first stream, flowing against us is too much to bear.
But where that strange brook ends beyond maps is no matter,
our geography is clear. We came to this rock
to pass the time, had a little love, and then we left.

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Carson Colenbaugh (he/him) is a poet and forest ecologist from Kennesaw, Georgia. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Terrain.org, Birmingham Poetry Review and elsewhere. Ecological work of his has been featured in Human Ecology. He is a 2024 Tor House Foundation Fellow and can be found on Instagram @carsoncolenbaugh