At Nu View Stone, Inc.
Pedro invites me into his realm--
granite wrested from middle earth.
Polished slabs in upright rows, an open-air library,
iron bookends bracing books for browsing.
Scanning the shelves, Pedro exclaims, Nature! Nature!
as though trying to summarize God’s universal library.
Tales of plates shifting, layers pressing, glaciers raking, kneading.
Even now, the stone only seeming to stay still.
See this piece? A map where a green river
wanders through alabaster plains.
Conceiver of cloisonné inlaid this giant jewel with mica.
A master mosaicist created that panel of peach and gold.
And yet. Also a graveyard, where we roam among headstones,
themselves the bodies disinterred by rapacious machines.
Imagine the butchery, landscapes disemboweled.
Or a battlefield strewn with dead—Ezekiel’s boneyard.
As a boy in Brazil, Pedro’s garimpeiro father
taught him how to prospect for gems they cut, polished, sold.
Treasures, he calls the stone around us now. Also a charnel house
where I choose bones he will cut for my kitchen counters.
Author: Merryn Rutledge
Photo: Olga Thelavart on Unsplash
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