This poem is a poem called "Stone."
And it's a kind of meditation on stone.
It's a rather strange thing for somebody
who lives in a highly forested part of New York state
to come to Arizona and read to you about stone.
But stone appears in different ways to me where I live there.
There are trilobites all over the lakebed area.
The place is full of shale with the layers visible.
It's not so stark as the landscape seems to me,
in my expert opinion after a few hours to be here.
But it's very different and the sense of--
the land was carved out by glaciers, they retreated
and after having carved deep lakes, some of them
600 feet deep, and so there's all this exposed stone, which
seems, to me, to be in such contrast
with the rest of the landscape, which is dairy farming
country--
rolly, lots of fruit orchards and suddenly
these big slabs and walls of stone.
"Stone."
"The creek has made its bed and wants to lie in it.
That's why spring is terrifying.
Water rises like the bloated drowned against the ice.
In the churn, stones are born, stunned.
And at night, the house rising like a cliff of fire.
There were the trees, mobiles of shale,
and the grass like a field of tiny gravestones growing wild.
And the moon, a stone fruit, hoping
to be opened, its 28 sections of stolen light flying home.
In the stream bed, a stone shaped by water surge.
It looks like the ankle bone of a lost
species grown too graceful.
Evolution makes us sleek for the long flight.
Finally, our common life breaks open,
a pod releasing its stone peas and the Earth
bears, in a few places, a few wrinkles in our shapes
for a few million years."