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The Stone Shell

Dave Motes

On the coll of this ridged and ravaged hill,
six hundred feet above the river, I find a shell,
perfect, delicate, solid stone--
a thousand miles, a thousand feet from any sea.

The junipers and maples clench the bedrock, find an angle
relative to sun and slope,
through generations of leaf-mold which wash about
the shanks of trunk like layering waves on a summer beach.
The soil is loam then rock that shows more shells,
more sea if your shovel searches slowly.

Here in my day, pushing quietly toward the calendar,
I drag my foot idly over the soil of our life and scrabble up such a shell.
In it I see the progress from living thing to ornament of stone,
the sign of waves of life that wash through forming mountains.

A notable day is one such idle artifact, among a myriad,
that time might skitter along the geology of our life
and maybe chance a future meeting with a judge
of detail such as myself; more likely buried for the term.

So when casting out such shells I think now I will see
the states of them, in time, when rolled up on the beach by storms,
or scoured by rivers, trod and broke, forgotten, frozen,
maybe lately frothed out tops of mountain waves

for the instant touch of men.

Calendar-Spring

In calendar spring, on the far bank
I can see shadows of old snow in the draws and creeks.
This side sunlight washes by upstream.
I can look wrong distance into the cottonwoods,
far enough for green to grow from grey and black
and merge into a hint.
On the berm a bank of sandy silt remains from the winter high-water,
covering the husks of last year's summer riot of
burdock and ivies and stinging-nettle.
The stink rises like hope, like a promise of warmth enough to
raise the plants again, and bed them in this yolk of river-richness.
The water’s winter-brown is tinted through with clarity and life.
Where the refugee sun probes it gives up subtle sips
of future greens and blues and clarity down to gravel.
The drift-ice grumbles by, promising revenge.

Potomac Water Gap
Dave Motes

The river’s bed is studded with white-veined granite teeth.
Every ancient inch is singular,
Exposed fingerprint rilles and whorls, the earth’s pit,
Remnants of ridges a thousand feet above.
A history of water made space in this spot
Dense patience waiting its way.
Adrift down a trace of God,
I let my eye slide over a wrinkle of time.
At the height is age, unbroken but where
the slightest shrug first let water through
when the ridges were young and holding back an ocean.
Smoky seconds ago the caissons
lugged lead along the defilade:
flicker of expression, ancient face.
Lower is the ravage, where cataclysm savaged ages
Of graceful rock in prodigal gusts, making monuments
In angular faces and jagged prows of mountain.
fady tints of human color half erased
in a shrug of decades:
rouged seams, granite profile.
Sinking I see scratches and scuffs on the billow of rock
Where bridges and canals traced their motives,
Respecting the plan, taking the lesson of how to hold.
Massive piers scoured down,
iron tanglebent in rusting spavined masses:
rearing rusty snags of engineering
visible at the river’s leisure.
Below me, borne upstream by my passing,
an infinity of stone roots roil and channel,
a language of age
patiently testifying to the time that does not fly
but chips and licks in gentle gradual conquest.

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