Stone

Water and Stone

It is here, in a field on the banks of Big Creek,

that I learn how water does a thing called redeem.

In April and May, I wait for a good rain to wash

the dirt from rock.  All night, I lie in bed and listen

to the sound of water falling down, sifting stone

from the ground in a black and broken field.

In daylight, near a bend in the creek through oak

and pine, I walk plowed rows and clay gullies filled

with sand, finding everything lifted from darkness

to light: rusted plows, china chips, marbles, pottery,

arrowheads, and spoons.  In a land without stone,

we are liberal with the name, calling all things stone

that are solid and remain when fall fires and spring

plowing are done.  Our hardest rock is heart pine,

but I have found other stones like bones and bricks

and kernels of corn—seeds grown hard on the stalk,

turned to stone in the heat of the sun.  We even say

a name like time for the cold fire, ashless and dark,

burning in the ground.  I am a gatherer of stone

whose bones will lie somewhere, white in the rain

on black earth, tumbling in the groundswell of fields

and fences beneath open sky.  I am thirty years old

and keep a wooden crate of stones in my room,

not knowing why, but I hold on to what I find,

reassured by iron, flint, and clay—pieces like bone,

solid and firm, broken by time like a dropped plate

or hammered stone.  They are buried in the browning

of grass and raised by water to rest in the light

of the sun.  In darkness, I lie and listen to falling rain.

I hear a word, redeem, in the watery sound—rain

in the night pulls me like a stone from the ground.