after Colin Watson's "The Cave"

We are the two in the cave

the two and the one, the one composed of two.

You will know us from your body's own symmetry

and the compounds of your loneliness.

You might see us as twins

but that it not all of what we are

and does not tell the whole story.

We are not the same but share one sameness.

What you are feeling now is the effect

of that which is between us.

Two white poles

we weave a certain magnetism

on the loom of our arms

clasped significantly at angles like the arms of a symbol.

This is our permanent positioning.

Should we shift we would no longer be what we are

but another shape altogether.

Never to be separated nor drawn finally together,

we tell of something about oneness and twoness.

Here, we put it emotionally for you

so you might understand by our hands and faces.

Here are two sisters pulling and dragging

one head reclining

its eye-line tilted up and out,

one head bowing to the depths.

The sky is patched above the cave.

It is that changeful pink of many skies

hanging translucent like silk in that transition

where day peers through into night

and night clings in threads to the panel of day,

the sky that colour of births and deaths.

And the cave never changes its light.

Here we are as you see us, the human

crisp before a blur of spaces

that might be spinning senseless beyond what you see.

Still, the sky and the cave

the cave and the sky

and we two making an endless one before you.

See at last one arm root us down with the staff it leans on,

while another tips into prayer.