January 11th: Stone Etcher

January 11^th: A Sculptor A Stone An Etcher Alone

I wonder: how does one go into stone

                cutting, choose to smooth the block

                quarried from the deep below moss

                and water for the eternity of dates
                and dashes and names?  Does a grand

                father do it maybe or a father?  Does
                a guy just fall into it hard and forever?

                And then does this guy ever walk the gallery

                up and down hills in and with trees

                and think this is mine--see--

                and raise his face to the rain?

Today most go through machine, see each

                engraved face scanned into 0’s and 1’s

                the screen of these being what we’ll see

                and voila! after a button and time

                and dust pulled up out of the air

                it’s a man and his best bird dog

                in black granite to last the deep years

                walk with his gun and the sun

                in his favor and a quiet retriever.

I’m thinking it must’ve been more intimate

                just hands letters and stone 

                and a blank slate (excuse the pun)

                and he comes in the broadest light

                this guy and at the right height, I don’t know

                hip, right?  to keep the elbows free

                to swing and sweep free.   This intimacy

is a different marriage entirely, a mistress convincing

                this never-in-your-lifetime-anything-but-the

                stone to glow, to go soft along the line

                to let a man not climb but settle within,

                beyond:  Here lies the second wife

                prayer, she’s lived a long life and a widow

                besides.  Only a choke at the throat

                poor guy, opening (and only he knows)

                the small mouth of the lamb

                a new mother and her child…

Hand carved them.  Lambs.  Solid stone

                ghosts, lowing as though their nose

                will always go into the sometimes mown

                sometimes grown to choking grass that years

                later a lady may pull away and say

                baby baby and take the afternoon, maybe

                the whole day that way.

He has to say, seeing her, a mother he thinks,

   and then making his own boy’s stone

   or maybe not has to but does anyway, out loud

                because he cuts alone, I remember when I made you,

                I remember making you, your mother’s robe fell

                open and that was the first time I’d ever seen

                an eclipsing areola, mocha gold and a pebble

                nipple tip under my rough thumb.  I think I rubbed

                and rubbed and she came up under my hand

                a mirror of water and I buried myself

                there in her.  I let my eyes drown

in that soft dark because days are dates and names

                and straight lines they’re knives and blades, flakes

                chipped away they are slips of paper

                prayers I can say, lips to stone to blow low,

                tell me, what letter does a long lungful of air

                begin with and is it the drawing in I start with,

                nose to throat, hold and the dust of your stone

                low low lying down there low, or is it

                the letting go, through cheeks and teeth

                wet, whet, when I polish, cold?