Day 89. The Thieving Geologist

you think i'm listening--
i'm picking your brain for stones that i might add to my pockets.
pretty stones, broken stones i carry them all the same
like a child walking on a beach for the first time.

me, i walk the pages of the giant, ancient atlas
my dad has
(the one that still recognizes the soviet union in both political and geographical form)
trying to lose your stones.
carrying these stones across every river,
from the Yangtze to the Nile,
casting them on every bit of ground i can find like i could
get rid of them just like that,
throwing them into the air
letting them leave my hands long enough for the
sun to swallow them into its skyly body,

i'm letting them fall through the page into
an ocean probably, another continent
but i'll chase them down-- I don't lose stones.

maybe i'm looking for a river where your stones,
yours and mine and everyone we know's stones,
will pull me down and down
pockets of lead leading to the pebbly bottom
where i can bury myself under smaller things and
cozy up to bedrock.

maybe i'm looking for a map in my dad's atlas
marked with different places to hide your stones,
where they can weather over time until
in trillions of years
when the sun burns out
they are
sand at the bottom of a vast dark ocean
right before it freezes
into what will look like
marble, or granite, or quartz.