River Rock
Feb 11 2014


River rock
is pink and grey
and egg-shaped,
like some exotic bird's
speckled, flawless.

They have surprising heft
nestled in their river beds,
tumbled and buffed, snugly tucked-up
against one another
under rushing water.
A deceptively clear lens,
too deep

to reach the bottom.

Impossible
for such a perfect rock
to come from nature,
a ball-bearing, precision milled
compared to silt, gravel, flint,
obsidian, erratic, granite.

I feel inconsequential
before the sheer-walled cliff,
the passage of time
in its segmented strata.
And this coolly smooth rock
I compulsively touch
again, and again,
its age, too immense
to imagine.


The New Yorker reviewed Elizabeth Gilbert's (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) new book -- Signature of All Things -- with the phrase "flinty, funny, incandescent."

This poem has absolutely nothing to do with that book, or the review. But "flinty" really caught my ear. I immediately wanted to play with geologic terms, and was struck by the evocative short-hand geology offers, despite the mismatch between hard eternal rocks and the squishy transience of living things.

(Just think about the powerful allusion contained in words like bedrock, granite, quicksand, schist (which, not inconveniently, rhymes with "split"). About the metaphorical possibilities in slow metamorphosis and explosive igneous, in the subtle distinctions of slowly accreting sediment. About how you could personify the murky translucence of quartz, the peeling back of mica, layer by delicate layer; asbestos' impassive resistance to fire, and basalt's flat blackness. Or about what could be done with flecks of gold and mountains of tailings, an eternity of radioactive waste.)

The dead opposite of flint has to be river rock: the sharp brittleness of flint; the hefty smoothness of hard rock sculpted by eons of moving water. Which is where I got stuck; and so it became a poem about river rock, and then about the way such a perfect surface signifies an incomprehensible vastness of time. While my exploration of geologic terms ended up being reduced to the abbreviated list that ends the 3rd stanza; a list chosen not just for rhyme and rhythm, but for the contrast of its craggy abrasive irregularity. (An "erratic", by the way, is a large rock that stands inexplicably alone on a relatively flat surface. They were churned up by glaciers, then randomly deposited as the ice sheets retreated north.)

I think the beginning of the second last stanza says something about man's hubris: where "impossible" seems to question, in its scoffing voice, the ability of blind nature to make something just as good, or better, than something made by high-precision industry. The implication is that even if we could match it, the naturally formed rock would still be priceless: because we can simulate time; but can never own time, or even truly know it. This is much the same as comparing a real diamond to an industrial one, or a natural pearl to a cultured one. In both cases, we value scarcity, and there is no faking it. And what could be more scarce a commodity than time?

I like the bird's egg analogy: not just the shape or speckling or nestling, but also the conflation of geology with living things -- what initially inspired the poem. I think there is the idea of surface here, as well: is this like any rock, the same all the way through; or does the surface conceal some complex and mysterious interior? And how easily fooled we are by superficial resemblance?

I also like "compulsively touch": because who can't help but play a cool, smooth, perfectly hand-sized rock between one's fingers -- over and over again, like rosary beads, a talisman? And any time I can get tactility into a poem (or, for that matter, the sense of smell), I do: because, as I repeat too often, the most powerful poems are all about sensation and emotion; while dry description and analytical thought stop a reader cold.