“It’s been a long week, and I’m washing stones. Off-cuts of Vermont “verde antique”, blue Brazilian granite and a black marble, veined with webs of white. My secret source for discarded pieces has a ranch house with no parking for an additional truck, so I pull in on the grass. It’s been the finest of fall days, back-lit by a waning sun, the tangerine & blood orange leaves of maple trees still scattered like flags as the hills go dark. If “taupe” is a color, then the world is dis-taupeian and dystopian, all of a piece. Taking the back way in, I encounter the less than adequate space of a one lane, fourth class road, still open, but impossibly narrow which makes me speed. “It’s shorter”, he’d said. Famous last words. The logic of my technique prays that no one is coming in the opposite direction. I’d like to get out of here without having to back up a half mile. And this, another pinched series of forest switchbacks, with that tell-tale “Devil” set into its geographical nomenclature. Not my favorite, but certainly a topography to ponder, from a safer distance. I’m not above considering the myths about underground cities. Not everyone was nice who started one, so I tread with a light step, on the accelerator pedal. Just in case there’s a portal nearby, one might inadvertently stumble into. My Gazetteer of old fashioned maps has been rained on too many times, & the plastic coating that must have seemed suitable for adventure decades ago, is now curling off & disintegrating. There doesn’t seem to be anything accurate to replace it, with all that is going on with old roads, these days, so it’s trying for the older generation, used to taking pride in map reading. A mega-million dollar home could be at the end of a cow path. A cadre of video surveillance cameras could now be guarding an old dam, or spillway, formerly thought of as a public town feature. Some property manager the next town over might be dealing with alarms you set off, by pulling over your truck, to look at a remote barn or mountain meadow. Meanwhile, William Shatner is babbling on about how cute earth looks from space. I wish he’d stick to his morality plays, a la Star Trek, his rap and campy, musical monologues. He and Elon and Jeff, are not cut from the same cloth and have absolutely nothing in common. Anyways, my slabs of precious, dug rock, as personal to me as the roots rock of my song repertoire, glitter with luminosity of spirt, earthy and spiritual. I pile up the stones I want and he says: “How about $40?” I guess I’ve earned some truck with dense matter. A grueling week, in rain and shine, using pitchforks to pull up mats of sorrel & witch grass, clear field stones, pry out almost dead shrubs still clinging to their dreams, ah, I see it all. And feel it. With each turn of the key, startling to life the motors of our work vehicles, we muscle our own determined agendas into the mechanics of what we can do. What can I say, to whom, to let them know how much I care. With my small, tiny words, said infrequently, and nearly always swallowed up by something more loud, who will hear how much I love them? My voice is diminished and almost turned to stone, yet, we know how stone holds fossils & magically holds light and hope. And can be buried in total silence without any guarantee of being allowed to speak or be free. And yet, can grow more deeply intensely beautiful, blue and articulate, below the chatter of chastisement, ridicule and shame.”
