River Stones

These are the stones that ground nails and sharpened talons, they have slid under mountains of ice and fire, have been polished by the glacial dead. The stones endure now in layers of motion and stillness, some are wind-tools shaped by a tireless chisel, other’s glint with a past and crushed starlight. The river has left signs of its scouring trace. I turn a stone over – look backward to a molten world. I can hardly imagine the slow burnish of such immutable forces, suddenly I am a fish out of water, my mind wriggling across an ice floe.