A Transmographication of Stone

A Transmographication of Stone

The shard I lift is shaped like the rear-end

of one of those

art-deco charter-busses from the fifties Or maybe

the square-nose of the whale

in my illustrated Children's Bible Story book

just before Jonah got gulped

And I see that stone

is transport, is container, is

perhaps punisher… perhaps

salvation—

(after all, Jonah lived—

his alternative, drowning)

But Rosa Parks moved to the front--

the part of this bus that is missing,

like some horrific accident dissecting

the greyhound

the whole front section gone—

maybe hurled over the edge of the road

and into the canyon,

derailing the whole

civil rights movement…

And Jonah moved, by peristalsis,

contradictions and gulps

ever closer the back of the fish with

churning prawn and kelp

toward the normal exit

before God gracefully intervened

with gag-reflex

so Nineveh could hear

and be spared…

Oh, my charter-stone! My Moby-rock!

Protector of petrified passengers!

You have a deep-red heart

--no metaphor here, really--

a deep red, iron deposit heart

like rust, like blood, like something sacred

you traveled across centuries

to bring—disembarking now into

my hand,

saved from the drowning

of deep untouched geologies,

spared the discrimination

of mineral classification.