Surface Hunting

you'd tracked in from whatever

          neighbor's field had just been plowed.

Spearpoints, birdpoints, awls and leaf-

shaped blades surfaced from the turned earth

          as though from beneath some thicker

water you tried to see into.

You never tired, you told me, of the tangible

          past you could admire, turn over

and over in your hand—the first

to touch it since the dead one that had

          worked the stone. You lined bookshelves

and end tables with them; obsidian,

quartz, flint, they measured the hours you'd spent

          with your head down, searching for others,

and also the prized hours of my own

solitude—collected, prized,

          saved alongside those artifacts

that had been for so long lost.