Love is water, our shared
history, stone;
each encounter alters us a
little.
*
These limestone
rocks
are records of the
sea’s wide journeys.
Rollers have pummelled
them with glassy tons,
or played tame, froth kissing
their skins;
have brought them
the world’s particles,
carried some away.
Stones get a taste
of life like this;
and water daily
meets its limitations.
Exchange,
exchange;
both are changed by
it.
*
Each of us is water,
each is stone;
how difficult
to map those elements
in one another, truly.
*
A few mayfly decades
can’t comprehend
how long this
shoreline has been trading
with the sea, in an
alliance of opposites.
What constellation
of improbabilities
has placed a
trilobite or scrap of fern
inside some of these
stoic rocks
as water, rhetorical
and moody,
has lavished
inexhaustible experience
in wearing stones
into these shapes, these?
*
Now
and again
let’s hold one another to
the light
as if each were the one
stone in the world,
as if there’s no end to
illumination.
*
Collectors, beady
with desire,
raise their fossil
hammers,
smash randomly
the smooth grey
bellies of the stones
and, seeing mainly
absence,
leave almost all,
inner worlds exposed
for the first time
ever;
brown, grey, ochre
chronicles
enlightening no one.
Who cares? Not
stones.
As water sluices
round their
splintered hearts,
with unimaginable
slowness
they are becoming
sand.