Fourteen thousand years make little difference.
Some of us, finding smooth places in the rough
must carve there, using old water marks.
A stalactite for a horse’s thigh, its eye
a fault, or where the river fingered a whorl
a vortex turned the doorways of the skull.
Sinews of calcite, muscles run and slack,
the belly droops, a boulder marbles bone.
The imagination’s caverns cry for symbols,
shout out to the hot sun in the present tense.
We walk again in the afternoon,
watch out for vipers lazy on their stones.
Two tractors are towing home the harvest.
Tobacco saps evaporate in rows.
The glittering Vézère is at its work,
its inexhaustible calligraphy.
Brother, grinding your colours by tallow light,
I hear your heart beat under my collarbone.
by Gillian Clarke
from Letters from a Far Country (1992)
Additional information: Font-de-Gaume is a cave near Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil in the Dordogne department of south-west France. The cave contains prehistoric polychrome cave paintings and engravings dating to the Magdalenian period. Discovered in 1901, more than 200 images have been identified in Font-de-Gaume. Along with other nearby prehistoric archeological sites, Font-de-Gaume was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979 as the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley.
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