This is called "The Museum of Stones."
I have a friend--
instead of buying souvenirs and gift shops when he travels,
he picks up stones.
And he labels them beautifully-- stone
from this church, stone from this road,
stone from this graveyard, and they're
a lovely museum of stones.
So I started picking up stones when I traveled, too.
It's cheaper than souvenirs and more interesting,
except that I am not as organized as he is.
So I have a lot of stones now, but I don't know
where any of them are from.
So they're all together, and I can't tell them apart.
And they're from all different countries and things.
So I don't know quite what to do with them.
If anybody has any ideas, let me know.
But this is for him.
It's called "The Museum of Stones."
These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert,
and viaduct, battlefield, threshing floor, basilica,
abattoir.
Stones, loosened by tanks in the streets,
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hands of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire's oui, stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, horneblend,
agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold.
Stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
larva of a city's entombment, chipped from lighthouse,
cell wall, scriptorium, paving stones
from the hands of those who rose against the army.
Stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were
blown, those that had flown through windows,
weighted petitions, feldspar, rose
quartz, blueschist, gneiss and chert, fragments
of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe of a Buddha mortared
at Bamiyan.
Stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children.
Stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary of stone, marker and vessel,
first cast, lode and hail, bridge stones and others
to pave and shut up with, stone apple, stone basil,
beech, berry, stone brake, stone bramble, stone fern,
lichen, liverwort, pippin and root, concretion of the body,
as blind as cold as deaf, all earth a quarry,
all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk with hope
that this assemblage of rubble, taken together,
would become a shrine or a holy place, an ossuary, immovable
and sacred, like the stone that marked the path of the sun
as it entered the human dawn.