mineralogy

To pick up a rock and look at it
returns a child through ritual.
Eyes fall innocently and open
onto the surface of held time.
There for a few open moments --
when sunlight brushes minerals
and hints of color free for anyone --
the mystery of early days returns
quietly many things nearly forgotten....

Other stones, minerals, and shapes come
to presence, signaling with light on surfaces
uncertain code about the passion of gravity.

That time crawling up an Arkansas mountain
and finding several quartz crystals gleaming,
ineffably mirroring the way a dream feels....

The stream-washed stones, rounded pleasantly,
retrieved to accent your flower garden, Mother....

Petrified wood in a forest, pastel bones of trees,
discovered on that outing to the lost cemetery....

They say the center of the Earth is magnetic.
I feel vibrations of seasons in a bloodstone.

This rock does not hold the texture of heaven,
nor does it manifest a brute totem for an atheist.
Nostalgia's mass and momentum are not the thing.
It's about what is squeezed between living breaths.

I feel you both, Mother and Father,
in the depth and heft of this rock
picked up at random on a planet.