A Monograph on Stones

They hold within themselves the history of a place.
Anointed through a kind of divine intervention,   
stones must give their say-so to be moved.

Let me knock on the door of a granite body
and go in, past star charts and markings,
to the little astrolabe with a heart hung at its center

and read there the epistle of limestone, the codex
of obsidian, walk along the rough corridor
on my scuffed and bleeding knees.

Like the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, 
I know that a stone with a core rattling about 
within it / clinkity clink / is pregnant.

Shooed from place to place, I carry my wailing wall
with me, and the dome of the rock as well.
See me thump my forehead in lamentation.

I would shimmy up the dome of becoming 
to make a third hallowed temple, 
throw down handful upon handful of devotions.

On a high ridge of rock jutting out into the sea,
seven terracotta heads are looking in five 
directions.  I believe in the mysticism of stone.

 

© Jan Lee Ande