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Sea
Pebbles
My
love, how time makes hardness shine.
They
come in every color, pure or mixed
gray-green
of basalt, blood-soaked jasper, quartz,
granite
and feldspar, even bits of glass,
smoothed
by the patient jeweller of the tides.
Volcano-born,
earthquake-quarried,
shaven
by glaciers, wind-carved, heat-cracked,
stratified,
speckled, bright in the wet surf—
no
two alike, all torn from the dry land
tossed
up in millions on this empty shore.
How
small death seems among the rocks. It drifts
light
as a splintered bone the tide uncovers.
It
glints among the shattered oyster shells,
gutted
by gulls, bleached by salt and sun—
the
broken crockery of living things.
Cormorants
glide across the quiet bay.
A
falcon watches from the ridge, indifferent
to
the burdens I have carried here.
No
point in walking farther, so I sit,
hollow
as driftwood, dead as any stone.
Dana
Gioia
"How
small death seems among the rocks. It drifts/light as a splintered
bone the tide uncovers." A beautiful but chilling line. The
description of the stones, too, "blood-soaked jasper",
"volcano-born, earthquake-quarried, shaven by glaciers,
wind-carved..torn..tossed up..." is one of violence. There on
the beach before him, the speaker sees a panoply of violence and
death. And yet, there is something else, too. "The patient
jeweller of the tides", who works the broken glass bits into
sea- glowing gems, the forgotten, broken discards made mysteriously
new/old, once common buttons or bits now uncommon, rare. The
strangeness of shells, which, though nothing but remains, skeletons
of once living molluscs, become something like pieces of art;
sculpted minute monuments to the lives they once housed. This is how
Time and the ocean work upon life and death. Curiously, with rhythmic
alchemy, so that what was once merely a multitudinous brokenness,
becomes a treasure, a sign of hope. The speaker, though, sits
among all this like a shell of himself, indifferent, unresponsive. Is
there hope that Time and the patient
jeweller will
do their work on him as well? If
stones can be made to shine, can broken humans be made something new?
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