A Particular Stone

I'm thinking about my dear mother today, May 23. It's been six years.

Looking back at the posts I wrote here around the time of her death, I found this photograph and these poems, sent by my friend who was then blogging under the name of Abdul-Walid. They felt like just as much of a gift today as when I received them six years ago. Here's the photograph, and what I wrote then.

That cobblestone has come with me to Montreal now, and it's in my garden, where I went very early this morning to spend some quiet time. When I pick the stone up, I think of it in her hand.

---

The Cassandra Pages, June 5, 2006: "The former blogger known as Abdul-Walid recently sent two poems which I am pleased to publish here. The photograph was taken last week. I had been thinking about the poems and wondering about a suitable image: rocks wouldn't do, and not just any stone. After my mother died, the people who live around the same lake sent two beautiful rose plants to the house in her memory. I went out to the garden to plant them. On the four corners of the raised bed I noticed that my mother had placed four stones - all round cobblestones, similar to this one, tumbled and rolled under the glacier which once scoured our area of central New York. They are so numerous that some local houses and barns even have cobblestone facings or foundations. This was the best one: inscrutable, enigmatic, beckoning."

EVEN A STONE

Even a stone
is too wonderful
for me.
But I must
begin somewhere.

There are days
when a stone is all
I can meet, it alone,
or at most a poem
into which
its secret has
been poured. But

even a stone
is too wonderful
for me,
even there
I cannot
begin.

----

TO A STONE

Final,
ground's eye,
confide in me.

Let me not be
like those who say:
“the sky is blue.”

Enough with
this describing.
What you have hidden
you have hidden.

Ferns, horses,
people, gods
have all gone
another open way.

But don’t say a word:
I couldn’t bear it
were you, too,

to mar this small
longed-for
silence.