April abomination, that's what I call this wet snow sneaking down day after day, down the edges of air, when we were primed for spring. The flowers of May will come next week -- in theory. And I suppose that witty sentimentalist, Heine, saw this same snow falling in the North Sea as into the Abyss. I look out now across this pasture, the mud and the matted grass, the waving billows of it, where the snow is falling as into our own abyss. I stand on Marshall's great rock, to which I have returned, fascinated, a thousand times. I stand as if on a headland or on an islet in the midst of waves, and what is this fascination, this cold desire? Once I wrote a poem about making love to stone and a whole book in which the protagonist, who was myself, carried a stone with him everywhere he went. I still like that poem and that book, and yet for all my years of stone-loving I've learned not much about stone. Oh, I can tell slate from quartz from sandstone -- -- who couldn't? -- and here in this district we even have an exotic stone, the talc, that feels warm and bloody in one's hand, but basically I am ignorant. Let the geologists keep their igneous pyrites to themselves. I don't even know if this great rock, projecting bigger than a barn from the slope of the pasture, is a free boulder that may have come here from the top of Butternut Mountain who knows how many eons ago, or part of the underlying granite of Vermont. I stand on its back, looking into the abyss. At all events the fascination is undeniable. I always said there could be no absolutes, but this is stone, stone, stone -- so here, so perfectly here. It is the abyss inverted, the abyss made visible. Years ago when I wrote that other poem I might have taken pleasure from this, I think I would have. Now I am fifty-three going on fifty-four, a rotten time of life. My end-of-winter clothes are threadbare, my boots cracked, and how astonishing to see my back, like that figure in Rembrandt's drawing, bent. I shift weight on my walking-stick and the stick slips in wet lichen and then my boots skid too, and down I go -- not hurt, just shaken. And what a hurt that is! Is it consoling to know I might have fallen into the abyss? All this in silence, every word of it spoken in my mind. The snow falls. Heine, there must be something wrong with us. I've heard this pasture moaning at my feet for years, as you heard that gray sea, we two shaken and always unconsoled by what we love, the absolute stone. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE TRIUMPHS OF OWEN: A FRAGMENT by THOMAS GRAY RECUERDO by EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY PHRYGES: JUSTICE PROTECTS THE KING by AESCHYLUS LILIES: 14. THE AWAKING by GEORGE BARLOW (1847-1913) HINC LACHRIMAE; OR THE AUTHOR TO AURORA: 35 by WILLIAM BOSWORTH THE CAPTAIN by JOHN GARDINER CALKINS BRAINARD |