A man’s work
he must bend for them,
his lifting become
stone-shut
with a stone’s presence.
Stone of house, stone
of monument.
Nothing in their gift.
Stone in a man’s field
or a man’s shoe –
piece of the Earth’s
wish to be idle, rid of us,
fraction of misery.
Not as the sea is:
weeds, birdcries, a fish
glancing the sunk light.
Sea changes totally,
stone rarely. The dead
form a new kind of stone.
It will not alter. Snap
and be nattered to dust
or the chafing of water.
Part of the sea asleep
in its own shadow. Part
of its stone.
Dragged to the field’s edge
to be grown over, useful there.
Others rise in the rain,
chiselled by frost,
tossed up by boys.
Some arrive strangely by night
or happen as comets do. In New England
frost forces them out,
stone on the move.
And some lie continually
in the field’s road
finding their ways back
into bleak malevolent creatures
wanting to sit in open fields.
The man keeps pelting them
in a backward whirlpool of stones
slewed over centuries.
As if this were a battle: a man
hurling stones and the stones’
slow returns to their orbits.
As if they would lie barearse
to the sun, giving nothing growth.
Stonecold we say. The great music
goes on without them,
Mozart’s mind forming again
in the members of the orchestra,
in the air, in the bow
touching the string, the conductor
commanding what he heard once
In the blank faceless thing
nothing of our meanings
but that it outlasts us, holds up
the names that mean nothing now
in the wind wearing them away
where the scripts change
and the dialects weather
as the words shift their meanings
in the long war with silence
till what’s left is a finger-traced
blur where the chisel cut
let vandals look upon this epitaph.
That it is stone, that
it is cold, that it is
chosen for sepulchres.
Nothing there: a few bones
picked clean as sticks
and the seasons drained out:
a stone flag,
a lament for dead people.
And nothing in that, nothing
can be staved off: mine
is a stoney vision they say.
Out in the strange light
grown in the world.
Absence of stone
assenza di pietre,
the stone
solo pietra raschiata
scraped to its usefulness.
Stone taken into speech,
counting stone, stone
turning in the mill,
the ruminant, la ruminante.
Stone taken from the moon,
I have since touched one.
Stone ballast used again
building the shipman’s house,
the miller’s table.
A Roman stone I took
years ago that had lain
centuries its pavement
under the Saxon graveyard.
Stone of absence
pietra di assenze.
Stone of Beethoven’s fist.
No more the miracle of gneiss,
nor graining nor quartz,
no scourings of rivers,
no granite, no dross
nor the eye of volcano
né l’occhio dei vulcani,
so little, the hot gas
of atoms blown back into space
that were Socrates, chert,
flakes of flint tool,
touch of all lovers, di fiumi
massi, puddinghe, detriti.
Nothing grown wild,
moving strangely, not moving
till the long ice moves them.
Not the bull’s dark,
l’oscurita del toro.
Not the beasts’ wonder,
la meraviglia delle bestie
stupite della loro stessa nascita
Not lichened over
under half the stars.
Not city stone nor stone
the wind forgot.
No stone at all:
a land gleaned clean.
All through stone. Things
immersed in it
become stone.
Without feature or interest
to what ice or water
scrapes it to.
Anonymous,
not dreaming nor dancing.
Intending nothing –
neither the good house
nor arrowhead
nor inconvenience.
Resisting.
Not resisting.
Holding on while the planet
shudders into more stones.
Nothing to be done
but be a grey boulder
or be pebble or be sand.
Not wanting to go back
into rock, not wanting
to enter the sea, not wanting
to be a small red flower
or a black shoe
or a lost button.
Not likeable.
Not bothered.
Turned in the hand, idly,
to the contempt of the busy.
What it would be
to be brought to it
forever in its place.
A man’s say to be
pig figure, bird entering flight
or the tiny house of a snail,
replica of the southern wind.
A man’s say. Not a thing
to do with all he says of it,
no more than birds their names.
That it may look
from the church wall
a man sharpens chisels.
From the bleak glance
of quarries came footstools,
thrones, the gargoyle’s
snarling waterspout,
knights in stone armour,
the poor kneeling or stooping,
stone thumb to the stone nose
locked beasts, Siva’s dance,
a man peering so long
till the seawind wears him away.
The man’s tools seek
a stone anaconda.
Bunched in riverbeds,
abandoned, stones
lie down anywhere.
They will not answer
out of the strange mouth
of the dead.
They will never mean anything.
Their silence
applauds them.