Marble is cold
like a lover, scorned.
Hard. Cutting.
It rejects heat.

Yet,
If you should touch
that frigid matter,
painstakingly, you can bring it to life;

make it look like there is blood
flooding through that stone.

for Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,
stone's a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:
crossing and vanishing
through their empty names:
water, stone, wind

by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger

Before you left,
I was a paradise,
A magical land of prosper and beauty.
When you left,
The rains stopped coming,
All the magic dried up to sandstone.
Then you came back,
With a river running wide,
Eroding the armored stone of my heart.

So many hotels and monuments,
Nobody looks anywhere but the statues in DC.
But as for me and you,
We look up.
To the stars,
Through the rain,
Far beyond.
I don't know a single soul,
That day dreams about seeing stars in DC.
Though, as for you and me,
We look up.
Beyond the veil of space,
Straight to the sparkling sky diamonds,
Flickering above this stone city.

I will stay with you,
Even when the times are hard,
We can make stone soup.

I think my heart might be made of stone,
It's durable, but often pieces of it crumble away.
It sparkles with crystals,
The remnants of happy memories.
It's cold to the touch,
After all, rock is heat resistant.
But that's not the greatest,
For I can't feel the warm fingers of love.

The mason works the living stone
to shape it for its slotted place.
Pale flakes of rock fly as he hones
it to a rough-hewn sandstone face.

With chisel and mallet in granite hands
and flinty grey eyes to plumb the line,
the rock gives way in grains of sand.
He chips and flicks one blow at a time.

His fingers trace each pit and dell
that he’d worked in with his iron tools,
while nostrils fill with chalky smell —
light dust clouds through his workshop move.

As one by one his blocks are laid
by his apprentice at his side
to fill the role for which they’re made:
they’ll be joined in one more arch of pride.

More arches form as months move past
then building up to many a year:
They mark the time of a life well cast,
his mason’s mark left on each stone sheer.

Each arch arises, pointing high
to the master mason of us all,
who carves and fits in his workshop sky —
by shaping, marking us in his wall.

Then piece by piece, the church takes shape
while grains of sand from worked stones fall;
The mason, now old, his final finial makes
as falling sand an hourglass recalls.

And here I stand in centuries hence
to spot the mason’s mark he left behind,
his arches pointing upwards whence
the mason built his final shrine.