Stone Speak

Somewhere I heard or read an account of a people — I don’t know now if it was anthropology or fable — who sent stones as a means of communicating across great distances. When you feel the texture and the heft of this rock you will know what I was thinking, was feeling.

Okay so it was probably fable.

But the stone in my palm, that fits as if it were dough pinched off to exactly the right amount to fit, the smooth roundedness, narrower at one end than the other like the snugness of the corner of the palm where fingers and thumb meet, overlap, enfold, and the striated speckledness — you surely know what that means as much as any poem or painting.

It’s a game I play with myself, I pick up this pebble and imagine it came from other hands that released it, saying, “Oh! isn’t the sky lovely today!” and that one says, “Sometimes I feel so broken I don’t know how to continue onward, and then I think of the beloved and I persevere.” This one here says “I have had to redefine strength and goodness and love itself as I have gotten older, but I think I have done it without betraying the idealism of my youth.” Many stones simply whisper “Patience.”

My fingertips with their unpretty callouses but their own sort of intelligence, they take in the rasp, the graininess, tiny indentations and impressions, trace the spiral of the ammonite fossil in my studio and it’s this: this morning I think it is delusional to imagine words more precise than mineral messages, or more evocative than the pure interval I have spent the morning reaching for, trying to train my fingers and ears to get to a more precise intonation. When I die, will it be with words on my lips, a chord in my ears, or a pebble clasped in the warm dry center of my palm?