Stones

For Ellen Hinsey

My whole surface is turned toward you,

all my insides turned away.

—Wisława Szymborska, ‘Conversation with a Stone’

The pebble

is a perfect creature

—Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Pebble’

We generally assume

they’ve no interior or soul.

When we break them open

they present a new exterior.

They’re a fraction more

than nothing: a quality

of hardness, a resistance

to our touch. To our sight

bounded shapes: unmoving

inanimate. We speak of their faces

only metaphorically: lacking eyes

and mouth, at most they’re blank.

But sitting by this stream

I’m struck by your simple

presence. Meeting you

the water slows and wrinkles,

rushes on. Not going anywhere

to you it’s all the same whether

you’re clothed in moss or bare,

dappled, in sun or shade.

The stone is worldless, Heidegger wrote.

But is this a deficiency? I agree

their detachment’s perfect;

they seem outside relation—

to call them you a conceit—

indifferent to our distinctions:

geologic, metamorphic, igneous

sedimentary, sandstone, true or false.

But this afternoon as I worried

about what to write and do, they

and not the versatile stream,

appeared as sage—in the world

beyond the world, as though

they were primeval Buddhas

who attained complete humility

and sunken in meditation

hardly noticed death—

only an increase in light.

Luke Fischer