Stone hides itself in itself and thinks itself
Invisible. Its breathing is the near-death rhythm
Of hibernation. There is nothing of this in the word stone; and everything. The word of God is stone. Your lover’s last look back is stone. You take stone to your heart. You lift a stone from the beach and it fits your hand –
Fits just so, is sure to find its match
In the way your fingers close and make a seal,
The rub of salt to flesh (augur of sin, so quick in memory), how it leaches heat from your skin, reads your palm, tests your smell, measures your heartbeat, settles to sleep, as stones roll in the wavebreak, as daylight dies –
Dies touch by touch and you are left to chance,
To moonrise, to what you know of bones and the sea,
Of the bloodless shapes that come to you in dream. The stone is at your bedside between the book you have set aside and the photograph of your children who can never, now, be called back from the world –
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