Three Poems for Trusting Time – The Marginalian

If you wish to befriend time — which is the way you come to befriend life — flip to stone.

Climb a mountain and hearken to the dialog between eons encoded in every stripe of rock.

Stroll a seaside and comb your fingers by the golden mud that was as soon as a mountain.

Choose up an ideal oval pebble and really feel its mute assurance that point can grind down even the heaviest boulder, clean even the sharpest edge.

Rising forty ft above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a good poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), poet laureate of the co-creation of time and thoughts, composed along with his spouse Una and their twin sons.

A decade earlier than Carl Jung constructed his well-known stone tower in Zurich and conceptualized the realized self as an elemental stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a neighborhood stonemason to construct Tor Home and Hawk Tower. As this rocky planet was being unworlded by its first world warfare, he set about making “stone love stone.”

Seeing stonecutters as “foredefeated challengers of oblivion” and poets as stonecutters of the psyche, he went on hauling huge slabs of granite up from the shore, carrying time itself, cupping its twelve consolations in his mortal fingers, writing about what he touched and what touched him.

OH, LOVELY ROCK
by Robinson Jeffers

We stayed the evening within the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock partitions and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, as much as the excessive and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.

             We lay on gravel and saved just a little camp-fire for heat.
Previous midnight solely two or three coals glowed purple within the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of useless bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks throughout them and lay down once more. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the nice gorge-wall
Throughout the stream. Mild leaves overhead danced within the hearth’s breath, tree-trunks have been seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and thoughts. Nothing unusual: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Easy-polished by the limitless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure bare rock…as if I have been
Seeing rock for the primary time. As if I have been seeing by the flame-lit floor into the actual and bodily
And dwelling rock. Nothing unusual… I can not
Let you know how unusual: the silent ardour, the deep the Aristocracy and childlike loveliness: this destiny occurring
Exterior our fates. It’s right here within the mountain like a grave smiling youngster. I shall die, and my boys
Will stay and die, our world will go on by its speedy agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled within the snow round a brand new Bethlehem: this rock will probably be right here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
Which might be its atoms will nonetheless be bearing the entire mountain above: and I, many packed centuries in the past,
Felt its intense actuality with love and marvel, this lonely rock.

A technology later, one other nice poet displaced from the bedrock of belonging by one other world warfare tried to make sense of being human by turning to stone:

STONE
by Charles Simic

Go inside a stone
That might be my approach.
Let anyone else change into a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I’m pleased to be a stone.

From the surface the stone is a riddle:
Nobody is aware of how one can reply it.
But inside, it should be cool and quiet
Though a cow steps on it full weight,
Though a baby throws it in a river,
The stone sinks, gradual, unperturbed
To the river backside
The place the fishes come to knock on it
And pay attention.

I’ve seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed.
So maybe it isn’t darkish inside in any case;
Maybe there’s a moon shining
From someplace, as if behind a hill —
Simply sufficient mild to make out
The unusual writings, the star charts
On the interior partitions.

And though we’re “creatures formed by the planet’s rocky logic,” we’re additionally creatures formed by the myriad mercies of time, saved again and again by the leap past logic that’s trusting time.

FORGIVENESS
by Maria Popova

Could the tide
by no means tire of its tender toil
how again and again
it forgives the Moon
the day by day exile
and returns to show
mountains into sand
         as if to say,
you can also have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental energy
of turning
the stone within the coronary heart
into golden mud.