Art of Viewing Stones

Source: about.com

Unpublished. Suiseki is the Japanese art of looking at stones; there are more examples here.

The Art of Viewing Stones

In each a tale released by summer rain
to fall in baskets stacked beside
the rooster’s gate,

in each a color
grown from shadow’s stain,
slim tinctures born of folded ground,

to mime motion back into this fossil river,
dry bones tumbling
liquid as

the too-bright shine
in new lovers’ eyes searching
out their own reflections without reflecting on

what escapes them that first faltering instant,
slips into the cracked angles
of singing stones,

the part of life not
itself alive, love neither kind
nor loving but reaches back to dark elsewheres.

This is what the stones recall, their mouths
rammed full of clay, the part
each fossil knows:

to find is not to make,
the figure carved by the eye itself
from glass or gaze alike here has no home no life.

You left me here but I am not here. Let me tell
you where I think I am,
of mountains still

to come,
tell how seeds tell
of the curled petal, see me become

a river turned to stone, here in this stone
the moment held in the eye between
figure and ground.