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first published in Poetry London Chesil Beach
Love is water, our shared history, stone; each encounter alters us a little.
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These limestone rocks are records of the sea’s wide journeys. Rollers have pummelled them with glassy tons, or played tame, froth kissing their skins; have brought them the world’s particles, carried some away.
Stones get a taste of life like this; and water daily meets its limitations.
Exchange, exchange; both are changed by it.
*
Each of us is water, each is stone; how difficult to map those elements in one another, truly.
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A few mayfly decades can’t comprehend how long this shoreline has been trading with the sea, in an alliance of opposites.
What constellation of improbabilities has placed a trilobite or scrap of fern inside some of these stoic rocks
as water, rhetorical and moody, has lavished inexhaustible experience in wearing stones into these shapes, these?
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Now and again let’s hold one another to the light as if each were the one stone in the world, as if there’s no end to illumination.
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Collectors, beady with desire, raise their fossil hammers, smash randomly the smooth grey bellies of the stones and, seeing mainly absence,
leave almost all, inner worlds exposed for the first time ever; brown, grey, ochre chronicles enlightening no one.
Who cares? Not stones. As water sluices round their splintered hearts, with unimaginable slowness they are becoming sand.
Carole Satyamurti
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