WEBVTT

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This poem is a poem
called "Stone."

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And it's a kind of
meditation on stone.

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It's a rather strange
thing for somebody

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who lives in a highly forested
part of New York state

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to come to Arizona and
read to you about stone.

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But stone appears in different
ways to me where I live there.

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There are trilobites all
over the lakebed area.

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The place is full of shale
with the layers visible.

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It's not so stark as the
landscape seems to me,

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in my expert opinion after
a few hours to be here.

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But it's very different
and the sense of--

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the land was carved out by
glaciers, they retreated

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and after having carved
deep lakes, some of them

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600 feet deep, and so there's
all this exposed stone, which

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seems, to me, to
be in such contrast

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with the rest of the landscape,
which is dairy farming

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country--

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rolly, lots of fruit
orchards and suddenly

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these big slabs
and walls of stone.

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"Stone."

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"The creek has made its
bed and wants to lie in it.

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That's why spring is terrifying.

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Water rises like the bloated
drowned against the ice.

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In the churn, stones
are born, stunned.

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And at night, the house
rising like a cliff of fire.

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There were the trees,
mobiles of shale,

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and the grass like a field of
tiny gravestones growing wild.

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And the moon, a
stone fruit, hoping

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to be opened, its 28 sections
of stolen light flying home.

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In the stream bed, a stone
shaped by water surge.

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It looks like the
ankle bone of a lost

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species grown too graceful.

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Evolution makes us sleek
for the long flight.

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Finally, our common
life breaks open,

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a pod releasing its
stone peas and the Earth

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bears, in a few places, a
few wrinkles in our shapes

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for a few million years."

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