My Stone
It is perfectly itself,
without ambition
to heal anyone
or come crashing
through a window
of someone
who just wants to vote.
It’s not showy
like turquoise
or rose quartz
and will never
find a home
in a bolo tie
or a belt buckle.
It is basalt —
dense and gray.
It holds up mountains
and keeps the seas
in their place.
My stone fits my hand
like it once might have
helped an ancestor
hammer before
there were hammers.
I know it’s from Ireland
and would like to imagine
a sturdy fisherman
picking it up for ballast
and taking it home instead.
But I know a friend on vacation
found it by the seashore in Ireland
and gave it to me
to use as a paperweight.
Someday it may travel
through a poem
but remain unchanged,
perfectly itself.
* * * * *
Falling With the Snow
The snow is coming straight down.
I can count each flake.
It is as if the air had secretly been replaced
with clear oil or something else
I can’t think of right now that would slow
falling flakes so I can count each one
if I really want to try. I really just want
to go inside with the paper bag
of Ecuadorian take-out food
while it’s still warm —
so Iris and I can eat whatever it is.
I would be just as happy with routine Chinese,
but this is a city of choices in a free country,
I hear, and Iris is a good cook
who loves to replicate tastes
but hates snow and ice. No,
she hates ice and tolerates snow —
which can be very pretty, especially
the wet, heavy kind that coats
every twig on every bare branch,
clingy dead leaf and unlucky flower
and turns them into fragments
of a collapsed crystal palace. I really didn’t say
“crystal palace” did I? It’s hard
to say something new about snow
or the moon or the sea.
I know it’s hard to write about living parents
without dipping into the maudlin image box
that stays, lost but still potent,
in our childhood bedrooms.
My poetic legs have given out from trying to run away
from my perfectly ordinary childhood —
now I’m the one who’s falling.