the rocking stone -

You have stepped on something, crumbling,
a memory, a metaphor,
a chunk of this path that has fallen to the side.
You feel it more in pine-needles,
old, sodden, brown, lining the pea-gravel
that trails through the yard.
It is rocking now, gently,
cantering and levering,
first a horse of memory,
then a force for change.

You forgot that there were doves here,
pale like the sky, running through the branches,
and cooing, so like a child.
You know it because the trees have gone gray for the winter,
and the lowlands are filled with the rains,
the lilies finally dormant, markers of Advent.
These are your images of December;
somehow you’d forgotten
the greening of gazebos and the labradors inside.
And this is not where you belong, now,
but this is where your blood resides.

Others would not notice,
this imperfection of cobbling that is more.
But it has tilted your world;
what once was home has changed.
Have you grown heavier with life,
a child’s feet too large to avoid the cracks?
Your mother named things things for you;
the calla-lilies, gardenias, umber walls and damasked fabrics
were birthed from her voice
just as you struggled out from her to breathe
the strange air of northern streets, not southern gardens.
But she did not name the growing,
the vertigo of age,
the imbalance of a rock on the long way home.




GLS
1.2.92