Flint

A sculpture made from shards of flint
in a field that we only crossed
because we were lost and you had a feeling,
some pre-cognitive synaptic flash,
that we should follow the rotting fence posts:
abandoned points on a line graph.

Intuition is attractive
and, although the route was not taking us home,
I still followed you,
not just because of the sculpture,
conical-shaped, mathematical,
more for the conversation we had
about patterns in leaves,
in cabbages, Romanesque,
the golden ratio between our finger joints
and although we knew next to nothing
of hard figures, we sieved millennia
of algebra down to the plumes of water
around our calves
as we waded through the river
headed upstream 'til we saw you car,
with its hundreds of small components
which were beyond our comprehension.