rock steps, walls, tools

Written In Stone

“it is not written in stone,”

we say when the tenuousness of what we’re considering

strikes us as ephemeral, like writing in sand,

I have liked to write in stone,

to make a statement that is more likely to endure,

I built rock steps down to the creek 

at our cabin in the mountains,

decades ago I carefully selected rocks from the creek

and painstakingly placed them, and re-placed them,

with no mortar for binding,

no easy short-cut to fashion stone into form,

rock used to serve both function and beauty,

as if the world and the steps

fit each other with a rightness 

that sings like a flower,

I also savor rock walls from a century or more ago

where someone who worked the land to entice food from it

got rocks out of his field that would impede the corn’s growth,

that would delay the food they needed to get through their days,

the rocks could have been just tossed to the side,

maybe loosely aggregated into a rough pile

that spoke only of the utilitarian,

instead the shaper, the artist within him,

worked the stone into form for a rightness

he felt needed to be born,

Cataloochee

I love to find stone artifacts

whose beauty and undeniable function shout at me

to notice and appreciate them,

Soapstone pendant, experts at UNC have never seen anything like it.
Found in Henry and Joan's backyard.

a perfect spearpoint is clear and assertive

in the words it speaks, in the song it sings,

larger tools, too, can speak clearly,

Probably meant to be halfted, used as a hammer?

A chunky stone, rolled in a game.

Hand Axe.

but I spend more of my time

finding and considering rocks

who don’t speak so clearly,

was it shaped as a tool?

or did natural processes give it form

that only hints of possible shaping?

Found this in my garden.  Who knows?

every rock has a story,

and my wife and I have listened to how geology

reveals the past that led to this present,

I love the shouted tale of a mountain:

the brash power of a pluton, such as El Capitan,

Courtesy of Google Images

where a rock fist endures above the land eroded around it,

a large balloon of magma reached toward the sky

and did not quite make it, instead solidifying and enduring,

so that now it can speak to us, inspire us,

mountains back east murmur stories

as the fingers of time and erosion 

coax their softer shapes into being,

Courtesy of Google Images

last year I shoveled dirt and small stones

onto brown paper mulch in our garden,

the rain revealed a broken spearpoint,

Likely a Kirk, about 6000 BCE.

and I long to touch the shaper of the point,

who thousands of years ago knew this land as friend,

he wrote in stone, and I still read that writing,

stone which sings of his synthesis of vision and artistry.

Spearpoints and arrowheads I've found.

A drill?

by Henry H. Walker

May 6, ‘20