Maker of Stones

 

by Brett Rutherford

     After Magritte and for Barbara A. Holland

So many years of war,
of plagues and masks,
of fluctuating identity —
we all live now
in Magritte canvases
where anything can happen
and does, and anyone might turn
from flesh into solid granite. 

Has all New England
dropped all its glacial
detritus of a sudden
onto Manhattan? What gives
with all this geology?

You, of all people,
a slant-wise Medusa,
seem able to summon stones,
rock-hurler, caller-up
of hidden pebbles,
summoner of quarry blocks
as easy as hailing a cab. 

Almost without a thought
you are one of those poets
whose thoughts reshape the city.
For each one of your silences,
as we stroll through the Village
some quarry leaves off
another oblong obstacle
to reasonable walking.

Blithely you move forward,
while I must up-and-over
a never-ending hike-trail.

 Is the coast now smooth in Maine?
Are Vermont’s fields
now friendly to the plow
since all the impediments
have come on south?

 I am used by now
to the gravel you hurl
as periods; the shards
of gneiss that mark
your exclamations
(thank goodness they are few);

 but the small boulders
that pile around us
in the outdoor cafe
each time you leave a sentence
unfinished, are good
for no one but the pigeons.
I am not sure the waiter
will even find us again.

 The chalkless slate slab
you put up in front of us
is good for privacy
when a Jehovah’s Witness
comes leaflet-laden
with Biblical boredom;

 but it is all too much
for those of us unwise
in the ways of labyrinths
or masonry, inept
at making the rocks go
where they will serve
some purpose.

 When I go home,
I find my friend Steven petrified,
stiff as a Pharaoh
on a basalt throne.
The bowl of apples are marbleized;
whatever he had cooked
is dust on a plate of sandstone.
What am I going to do with him?

 And now some castle,
which huddled squat
on some peak of the Pyrenees,

hangs like the Goodyear blimp
just over Central Park,
and the stones of the Ramble
decide to evacuate vertically,
rock-root and trees and all
to form a hedge around it.

 Was this your doing, too?
Living as you do, one foot
in the surreal, you smile at this.
I guess you expect a ladder,
at some point, descending,
and an engraved invitation
from whomever it is up there
who is still flesh-and-blood.

 “Imagine the view!” you tease me.
“I wonder what they wear,
and from what century
their customs derive.” 

While that aberrant hulk
hangs like a dream-balloon
for your discourse
with air and lap-tongued clouds,
with whomever you choose as company
for your non-Newtonian discourse,

I stand below, confound with physics
what my eye receives,
and wait, with folded arms
its eventual fall.

 

The Collectors

THE COLLECTORS

     after Magritte

I know it was our father’s house,

but prudence says he wouldn’t mind

your packing up his legacies, a trunk

or two of city clothes, a photograph,

perhaps, of what had been a neighborhood

where now the sea laps barren beach

behind your yard. Do you enjoy the thought

that apple trees you climbed as a boy

are now the hanging place of cuttlefish?

Do you expect that whatever it is

that gobbles houses by night

and hauls the sidewalk off in chunks

will spare your little edifice?

I don’t worry so much                    

about the lobsters, big as cows,

that made off with the Belgian clock,

the marble mantelpiece, or the horn

that I left in the attic; their taste

is too baroque to warrant another visit.

But I will prove, if I must

with photographs and measurements

that the oblong rock once half a mile

at sea will soon adorn the lawn,

then, with a nudge, the stairs;

next day it will bulge into the parlor;

and probably within a fortnight

sweep you a mile up the beach

to that stack of abandoned houses

where it has already assembled

what’s left of the town.

It’s one thing to be “lived through”

by Cosmic Consciousness,

serving some higher purpose as though

the Universe had plans, and we

were its chessmen. But this won’t do,
this passive acceptance of

granite elbow-nudge,

this nibbling away at things,

reducing us to dust mite status

at the bottom of the vacuum bag!

Note: This is a revision of a poem that appeared in Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems. I suppose the "victim" feeling of the narrator is a good metaphor for today's politics, where we are all being nibbled to death by mice. The poem refers to three Magritte paintings, two of which I found, and was written back in the days when Barbara A. Holland and I hurled Magritte-inspired poems at one another weekly at poetry readings. These poems don't make a whole lot of sense alone, but when read against the paintings, I think they're pretty amusing: the weakness of "ekphrastic" poetry is that poet and reader really need to share the image. Magritte's strange work continues to haunt me, odd since I am not in the least a modernist.