To lick a salt stone is to give in to a raw, bodily need. Charles W. Bailey’s lyric opens with that small, strange act and then spirals outward—from mineral hunger to manic movement and moonlight, before settling into the slow turn of a beloved’s shadow. The title announces the salt stone as a kind of talisman: it precedes the speaker, solid and mineral, grounding the poem even as it flies upward. The central idea is that a physical craving can open into ecstasy and finally into intimacy; the speaker does not explain this journey so much as stay inside it.
The opening phrase, “I have licked / the salt stone,” uses the present perfect to make the act feel completed yet still active. The stone is definite—“the salt stone”—as though it is a known ritual object, not just any rock. Salt is what bodies need, and licking it is humble, animal, and necessary. The sentence then seems to continue with elliptical verbs: “Run mad” and “Leapt up” omit the repeated “I have,” so one action spills breathlessly into the next. Madness is described not as shouting or chaos but as being a “mushroom cap / bobbing in the rapids / of a dark stream”—small, fragile, and carried. A mushroom cap is not a heroic figure for madness; it is soft, organic, likely to be taken by the current rather than to fight it. Then the speaker ascends: “Leapt up / the oak ladder / to circle the / crescent moon.” The oak ladder is earthy and wooden, the crescent moon is cool and high; circling rather than reaching keeps the image dreamlike.
The poem changes key at “The wind / lies languid.” The rapids are gone. Wind is now resting inside “the ivory caves / of your / morning / mouth.” The line breaks slow the reader down so that the mouth feels cavernous, cool, and just awakened. Ivory suggests teeth, bone, whiteness; a morning mouth is intimate and soft. Then dawn does not banish shadow but wraps it: “The dawn wraps / your shadow / turning slowly / towards me.” The image is paradoxical: dawn requires light, yet it wraps a shadow, as though attention can hold a dark self without erasing it. The beloved’s shadow turning toward the speaker is a nearly imperceptible movement, yet it is the poem’s quiet resolution. The solitary “I” has become a pair, and the cosmic climb has given way to ordinary dawn.
Bailey writes in unrhymed free verse, but the poem keeps a strong sound texture: the hard consonants of “licked” and “salt stone,” the bobbing m’s of “mushroom cap,” the open vowels of “oak ladder” and “morning mouth.” Short lines and enjambment make each image arrive alone, and the white space lets the poem move vertically—down into the dark stream, up toward the moon, then outward into the turning shadow. The grammar of the first half, with its missing repeated subject, gives the poem its reckless speed; the second half slows into separate, delicate phrases.
What makes the poem significant is its compression and its trust in concrete images. It never explains why the speaker licks a salt stone or who the “you” is. Instead, it lets salt, dark water, moonlight, ivory, and shadow carry the emotional meaning. That movement from appetite to wonder to tenderness happens in just a few lines, yet it feels complete. The final image is not a climax but a beginning: dawn arrives, and the shadow is still turning. The ecstasy has become shared, slow, and gravitational.