I am grounded by my own ignorance, he thought, and here, by the sheer complexity of things. This pebble at my feet seems the very centre of a radius  - of marks and pathways. Possibilities. It is a thing that connects itself with me. It is very early, before the sun has touched the horizon’s sky.

I recall a poem telling of the perfection of pebbles, their being equal to themselves, mindful of their limits, filled exactly with a pebbly meaning, with a scent which does not remind one of anything, does not frighten anything away, does not arouse desire, its ardour and coldness full of dignity.

I now remember another poem, portraying a pebble placed in a child’s hand, picked up on a pebble ridge. A pebble to place in the pocket where we finger it until it becomes warm. Its shape and certainty is firm and sure. It consoles us. And, as we change and decay, it remains lodged with us: a thing that contains nothing save the mystery of life.

And there is a long prose poem devoted to the pebble. It starts at the beginning of time itself with a condensed cosmogony, describing the formation of the first rock as an allegory of The Fall. It ventures through the expulsion of life, to cooling, to those large tectonic plates, and all the way down to the pebble itself, or, as the poet says, the "kind of stone that I can pick it up and turn it over in my hand". Time is everywhere in this poem: Stone as Time, where the great wheel of stone rolls ever on as plant life, animals, gases and liquids revolve quite rapidly in their cycles of dying. Take this as the poet’s view of humanity: to consider all things as unknown, and to begin again right from the beginning.

We need to take the side of things, he thought. Here, this pebble is time, and where this pebble lies, with its radii of marks, seems at the very centre of things. It was brought anonymously by the tide one stormy night to lie at our feet, and looks at us with *a calm and very clear eye.