Birth Stones

Jeanne Stauffer-Merle

i.

I’m climbing down to the beach again
reaching into your old basket
dropping pebbles carefully behind.
As the sand hardens to slab
	        the air deadening to wall
I forget what these stones are.
Will you hold me in your arms?
		    They say nothing:
			   dark and inscrutable
			   like everything beautiful
			   poisoning every hand they touch
			   killing even the birds.

ii.

You stand holding my hand
my hand feeling
your fingers feeling nothing.
Your father face hovers above:
a dead moon,
eyes dry craters.
Your soundless swell
squeezes me
until my lips my ears like yours
are quiet.
Silence
isn’t soft and empty as air
but rock.

iii.

On the other side of the snapshot
the outline of beach
	          stiff as grave
ghosts through:
your name scratched
in thick ink
still smears my thumbs
smudges the blank space
where I should be.

iv.

I lift my empty hands in front of me
	         like a deaf girl holding out her broken ears.

v.

Where there are finally no more stones
I find your bones
	   the color of silt.
I walk away
a barnacled girl
still heavy
with your legacy.

vi.

Just where the beach turns to something else
				 something with opening arms
I drop my ears
	         two thin shells,
leave them to hear the surf
murmuring its tales of a girl sleeping
at land’s end
where the world

waits.