Rocks
B. A. Hawthorne
Rocks long to be colonized, hauled in ships’ cargoes;
as ballast they are noble and tearful;
as sculpture they exhale and worry about time.
They hold down estuaries every day with their tone.
They have forgotten how to fly.
They love indiscriminately, are gallant,
and allow themselves to be polished.
They are never roguish. Insolence
has long been drenched from them. Forget them
and they will be so full of talk new sky will be born.
Traveling at night from one day to the next, they are ever present
in your hope for a village slanting down to a harbor of tall masts
where their sisters are buried. They have intercourse with the ocean.
They carry the earth where she is going.
I go along.
They lie by the coast and know they might conjure a blue marlin
to flail above us. They are what rides in the wave behind you,
a ransom for every gesture with no trickery or plans.
They tilt only with the earth; without them there is no summit.
They are accepted by the new day and confer it on everyone.
Tie what you have found back to these rocks;
they will accept your weight. They are the ocean's absolution.
They tell everything to anyone who will listen and lie sentenced
in their own dense obtusion. They are always asleep.
I ride inside them as far as I can go, sleep inside
and stay for centuries. Soon they'll rhyme with gilded ceilings,
pendula who roll down deep in the tide.
B.A. Hawthorne is a writer, painter, sailor, based in Paris. Ex-Cookie Monster based in Alaska, brown bear in Saroyan play off-Broadway, ski patrolman, university English professor, Caribbean charter yacht instructor, taxi driver in Manhattan. Once sailed single-handed from Miami to Puerto Rico. Singlehanded because my cat Zooey was eaten by an alligator.