Stone Above, Sky Below



1. Embracing The Stone

Place stone, so.
Place stone, so.
Spring sounds
over white rock.

Place stone, so.
Singing whetstones
in the summer quarry,

long boats anchored
in the bay by day's long
toiling tone; sweat over
sweet bones

Place stone, so.
Autumn crackles
barefoot, a light leaf
jacket over eight tons
granite,

Place stone, so.
Earth contours
still thought.




2. Addressing the Stone

The cold-faced
stones,
the wrongness
of memorials
gone, his feet
touch an injured sky
braced for the smothering
stone, heat-compressed,
a making wish
walks stone
around and around
the agony of space.

There is space enough,
the stars placed, just so
there, and there!

where intense necessity
drives them to be,
Ha! find a metaphor for sand
on the perfect face of night.

Bone nature rubs
against the polished stone
and everywhere at once
the healing and the wounding
adorn an impulse to take
them home, to
place stone, so
among the collected works
held back against time --
good enough
to fulcrum the world
good enough, to leave
them alone.

Not yet, Noguchi,
not time to enter stone --
rocks hold dreams.
Ha! he laughs,
This one is too good for God,
and ships it home.

3. Entering The Stone


I have no desire
to participate in the throwing
sticks of politics


        watch inste 
the myri           ad rocks                   O' Noguchi

                                                              what shapes/
                                               the cut of continents?



what springs from nowhere?       
horizons     cut through rock 
stretched over
        stone hearts
        across 
                the torn edges
                of those lives
                          the
 
                                   barbed wire				
                                   sings


horizon's eyes


                twin suns
             rising, setting




washes
silicates, ciliated moss 
marks on cold stone
a shadow lengthened; 
home, where is that?


Over ground spun from
black embryo pools     they clutch at the breast of earth
                                      as if thirsting



        seek natural fault/lines in
        the Atlantic/Pacific fissure
        probed by




                our chisels (brown rust & quarry marks)


chip away at
stone cracks


                among the
                blackstone white/asian/white, french white
                white shadows of Brancusi


                where environment joins void solids,
                ideas run in sheets, water stacks
                in tear-thin veils to purify the ground

      over which it runs, this thing which is not stone,
      perhaps the way of all things,
               runs the way it does, 


   if you will please 
         see this flowing but not with the eyes


chipping
rondo
trochaic


AND words like s tne broken             left a year, two 
would   heal themselves. For them to heal words like stone
        to measure man, not stone
        dressed stone
              undressed


        one rock     two rock               solutions drip 
           on granite                drip on o'Moses rock
        to heal    to heal flowing    to heal from to here   

                                       noguchi i/Sam/u
                                       noguchi is/a/mu.
                                      

Isa-amu! Isa-amu!
They are ready now,

            ready to rise from the plaza
                    public places rocked 
        by curved workings through granite laminae
        legs like paper lanterns 
                       balanced making fun


Noguchi-san rock us to sleep
in your narcotic gardens
blank looking stone

staring back open eye dimming

                        regard the tears in marble swirling 
                   gone Noguchi-stone gone o'stone, o'gone




                                now go(née
                           gilmour-san)




                                           into the stone.