Landscaping Rocks for Sale

They look like what they are: wreckage, the offspring

Of explosions in the mountains, some still caught

In the act of colliding, slamming into each other,

Split images of themselves in this vacant lot,

All broken and in need

Of more breaking, outcasts, parts of a puzzle

Never to be resolved.

They seem like the embodiment of faction,

Dissatisfaction, cleavages, like upholders

Of permanent grudges, crackpots, splinter groups,

Perpetuators of raw dichotomies,

Schizoid blockheaded squatters

Whose purpose in life or death is putting it bluntly

To occupy space

And have done with everything and everybody,

Even their likenesses, and to hell with it,

Though some stand alone, jagged, in place, out of place,

Out of it, in an emergency ward

Of rocks, done for.

But in one corner, a dozen river stones

The shades of the under-sky through a spring of storms

Lie at their ease as if the current were still

Running over and over them, still taking

Their time away from them one grain at a time

And leaving as slowly

And swiftly there a time more durable

Than ever, to be lifted

Out of the light of earth into our darkness

And a hard beginning.