"stonecutter" poems
Day-colored wine,
night-colored wine,
wine with purple feet
or wine with topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the day,
nothing is left
of your immutable soul.
Wine
stirs the spring, happiness
bursts through the earth like a plant,
walls crumble,
and rocky cliffs,
chasms close,
as song is born.
A jug of wine, and thou beside me
in the wilderness,
sang the ancient poet.
Let the wine pitcher
add to the kiss of love its own.
My darling, suddenly
the line of your hip
becomes the brimming curve
of the wine goblet,
your breast is the grape cluster,
your ******* are the grapes,
the gleam of spirits lights your hair,
and your navel is a chaste seal
stamped on the vessel of your belly,
your love an inexhaustible
cascade of wine,
light that illuminates my senses,
the earthly splendor of life.
But you are more than love,
the fiery kiss,
the heat of fire,
more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I like on the table,
when we're speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
Drink it,
and remember in every
drop of gold,
in every topaz glass,
in every purple ladle,
that autumn labored
to fill the vessel with wine;
and in the ritual of his office,
let the simple man remember
to think of the soil and of his duty,
to propagate the canticle of the wine.
27.2k
In memoriam Asher and Franklin
Farmers flocked to Blossburg's mines
willing their abandoned plows
to perpetual dust and rain.
Burrowing into the Tioga hills
with Keagle picks and sledges,
they filled their trams with rough cut coal.
Black diamonds - carved for waiting boilers
of New England mills and trains
and Pennsylvania's winter stoves.
Brothers, Frank and Asher swung their picks
in tunnels deep beneath the hills
and brushed away the clouds of soot.
Their coughs at first seemed harmless
enough as from nagging colds or flus -
but deepened as their lungs turned black.
Pain and choking drove them to their beds
where no medic's art could aid them.
Then the coroner came to seal their eyes.
A stonecutter's chisel marks their brevity
on an marble graveyard obelisk
that pays no homage to their sacrifice.
September, 2007
Aug 22, 2013
Aug 22, 2013 at 3:57 PM UTC
The bone dry
hand of stone cutter
works away.
The clink
of metal on stone,
scraping,
dull and full,
How many strikes have they laid
trying to form a new passage?
Humans taking up the work
nature left unfinished.
But they might disagree
saying nature did the hard work
bringing the stone to this point
from a miles deep furnace
and all they’re doing
is hitting a stone.
Mar 22, 2025
Mar 22, 2025 at 2:37 PM UTC