The Intelligence of Stones

A stone has no reason to remember us.

It was old before the first hand
closed around it,
before we gave hunger a name
and taught the dead
to remain standing.

Still, touch limestone
and you touch an argument
that has outlived its witnesses:

shell becoming sediment,
sediment becoming pressure,
pressure becoming a hardness
we mistake for permanence.

This is how the earth
conducts its slow revisions.

Nothing is finished.
The mountain is only
a sentence taking centuries
to alter its grammar.

Even granite,
with its cold confidence,
contains contradiction—
quartz, feldspar, mica
locked together
without agreeing
on what they are.

Perhaps this is why
I trust stones.

They do not pretend
to be singular.

A river stone knows
that identity is abrasion:
the same body
made unrecognizable
by contact.

You pick one up
and call it smooth.

But smoothness is evidence.

It means something
has spent itself against it.

Water.
Sand.
Ice.
The patient pressure
of other bodies.

We admire the cathedral
for rising toward heaven
and forget its stones
were once buried
under other stones,

forget that every column
is carrying the memory
of weight.

Architecture is merely geology
that has learned
to imitate desire.

A wall says:
I will keep you out.

A tomb says:
I will keep you here.

A monument says:
remember.

The stone,
silent beneath all three,
says nothing.

Or perhaps its silence
is the oldest form of speech.

At night I think of the stones
beneath the city—

buried foundations,
old thresholds,
the chipped steps
of houses no one remembers,
coins pressed into mud,
a child’s marble
waiting beneath a century
of footsteps.

How much human life
can disappear
without disappearing completely?

The body leaves almost nothing.

A little calcium.
A tooth.
A trace of iron
darkening the soil.

Yet a stone remembers
without memory.

Not names.
Pressure.
Heat.
The direction of a fracture.
The violence of being split.

And there is something
almost indecent about this:

that the earth keeps
a more accurate account
of our touch
than we do.

You once placed your hand
against a wall beside mine.

Nothing happened.

No thunder.
No prophecy.

Only the smallest exchange
of temperature—

your warmth entering stone,
stone returning it
slowly, almost imperceptibly,
as though matter itself
had learned courtesy.

Perhaps this is what draws me
to anything that endures:

not that it remains unchanged,

but that contact
makes alteration inevitable.

The stone does not become
less itself beneath the river.

It becomes fluent.

Rounder.
Darker.
Bright with water.

And perhaps we are like this—
not monuments,
not ruins,

but forms continually
made more exact
by what we touch.

Your hand beside mine.

The wall holding its coolness.

Two temperatures
meeting in silence,

and the strange, beautiful fact
that neither of us
has to surrender in order to be changed.

 

 

 

 

Photo credits: A group of rocks by Tony Litvyak, Unsplash. 

Posted for Poetics: Lyric Petrologies @dVerse Poets Pub