Minding the Cave

by Paul Matthews

She, whoever she was, she
guided us through the painted
caves last summer.

The air made us giddy.
I’m still high on it, imagining
how shadows of earlier visitors

twisted into stags and horses
round the lamp they tended.
She showed us claw marks,

lines in parallel, scored
before ever our kind carried
their frail names in.

We touched bedrock there,
testing where world ends
and the mind begins.

This hallowed place, she said.
Its colours speak in sleep.
Its cries are all about us.

Nobody forgets those horses,
or the bison–women brooding
in the hollows of the rock–face.

We spun giddy with them
in the flickering light and left
our footprint.