Sunday 24 June 2012

Geppetto finds the stone


here is another poem in the P. series


Geppetto finds the stone

Even a lonely man who
has never married, whose
only fragrant memory
ended in Venice,
suffers the need to bury
his loved ones.

After having fallen, unexpectedly,
into the Ionian Sea, Geppetto’s sister
drowned in her lover’s arms,
and while the lover held and wept
in caricature, it was Geppetto
who dug the grave and buried her bones.

While digging his tears slid
down his cheeks and splashed
onto the earth, weakened the soil
allowing the spade to slide in
like a Spanish dancer on his knees
across the polished dance floor. Geppetto
found a stone; a single stone
amidst the earth.

Defying the moment’s gravity; in disregard
of the strange stares
from his sister’s suitably attired
lover and her gathered
enemies and friends, Geppetto
reached out his hand
and lifted free the stone.

He studied the stone while the crowd
murmured and fidgeted; noticed
the dark sheen, the minute dimples
that meant it was not as smooth
as it appeared, its unexpected lightness
and the white vein that encircled it
like a wedding ring. The stone had two fissures
that ran like two rivers along the surface
almost parallel, as if great pressure
once threatened to rend it into pieces.

He plopped the stone
into his white shirt pocket;
felt the weight of it match his heart.

He kept it as company
through evenings and days
as a marker to
his sister’s memory, not knowing
that its proximity to his sadness
instigated change.

The stone began to believe
it was a seed, waited
with the patience of rock
for planting to give it birth.

Meanwhile his heart
found itself, perhaps
in sympathy with the stone,
lighter as the months passed.

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