For Stone

Human, offer your big dumb love
for all stones:
the ones we climb, the ones we carve,
the ones we throw.

Keep your mouth shut, novice.  Don’t speak
if you want to know what to do here.
Listen to the gray whisper of stone
and follow directions.  

Maybe you are meant
to climb the largest ones, freestyling up
past ever-present death
without making a mark upon them. 

Maybe you’re destined to build
garden walls, fortress walls, paved roads;
prisons, temples, or something
that serves as both?

Maybe you are supposed to cut them
until they represent another thing
in its heaviest incarnation.  Maybe
you are fated to release the deities inside.

Or maybe you’re supposed
to hurl the small ones at perceived danger,
perceived food, perceived enemies.
Maybe you will turn them into sharp weapons

with well placed blows, one against another.
Will you recreate all the millions of years
we’ve already spent learning these things?  
Human, it’s hard to avoid — the big dumb love

we have for stone carries us there.  For now
put your face on the boulder in the path, 
cheek to its cool black nubble.  Pick up
a piece from the ground and slip it 

into your pocket.  Carry it around with you,
worry it with your thumb and maybe
after a long time it’ll be smoother 
than when you started — and still 

it will look not much different
than when you started, and if you lose it
or toss it it will wait, or not, for the next pocket,
the next slingshot, the next place it is needed.

Trust me when I say it will tell the next human
who finds it nothing about you
you would recognize as being your story,
but it will be your story nonetheless.