Fresh from their hibernaculum
under the lawn beside
the stone well,
the male garter snakes
thread themselves into a throbbing knot
and pull apart, thwarted.
Where is she? They circle
like eddies of wind, old skins
whispering through the grass.
After months under snow,
last autumn’s leaves
barely stir in the wind,
pressed flat as ears
to the forest floor.
Surely they know what’s coming.
Stones lie askew.
Whatever is beneath them shows no sign
of resting in peace.
Having melted the snow above it,
a black stone glistens
in its pit.
All thaws seem abrupt.
Lichens slicked with meltwater
glow a lurid green.
I’m feverish—might I, too,
burn a hole
clear through to spring?
Harbor at sunset.
A boy fires his air gun
into the water.
A bus and car
squeeze past each other
at the standing stone.
Crowded campground.
A fat herring gull walks
between the tents.
The stone isn’t dull;
it’s just too shy to shine.
The stone isn’t still;
it’s just practicing an extreme economy of gesture.
The stone isn’t mute;
it’s just making up its mind how to begin.
When I lived in a glass house
it was my most honored guest.
Persistence pays:
I once saw a pheasant just
where the stone dog points.
Among the cobbles of a shingle beach,
one thumb-sized stone draws
your beachcomber’s eye, too pure a blue
to be granite, opaque but somehow
promising translucence.
A wave clatters up & wets
your ankles. You grab for the stone,
now glistening—clearly glass
& once a shard, despite the loss
of all sharp edges &
its transformation from fragment
to a whole small world.
It has turned & turned in the bay’s
watery gullet, that precipitous gizzard
full of ersatz teeth.
What smaller, softer things
There was a time
The sound in my chest was soft
The clapping of flesh on blood
Soft and moist
But that was when I had a heart
Human it was
But the pain it brought me
Great and Sad
And now,
All I hear is screeching
A heart of stone
Hard and Dry
Like the grinding of granite on ice
The ice that now flows through me
The ice that now flows in my vein
I m blind
Mind went dark
Blindly toward sounds
Running on the stones
Chasing them
Running fast
Stop.
Sounds disappeared.
senile river,
floor littered
with aeons of pointless garbage
slender frameworks of beast
granite leftovers from
a mountain eaten during the mesozoic,
in lusty banquet of your middle age.
let it be said you are less than the
Least silence
of any entranced youngster,
Who gulps a nascent universe
with each unlikely breath.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing;
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
Wading that far
river, turning over
stones for caddis
flies unborn,
you met no one —
not even me.