..........
..........Stones
..........--Michael Blumenthal

..........We live in dread of something:

..........Need, perhaps. Tears,
..........the air inside a woman's dress,
..........the deep breath of non-ambition.

..........In a valley of stone,
..........men had to carry stones.
..........In a sea of fertility,
..........women could drown
..........in the wake of conceptions.

..........We no longer build in stone—
..........houses of rice paper, beds
..........of feather. Manhood
..........is the one stone we still
..........insist on, lifting it

..........From abandoned quarries,
..........carrying it on our backs
..........even when we make love,
..........until the woman beneath us
..........calls passion a kind of

..........Suffocation, surfaces for air
..........like a young child whose head
..........has been pushed beneath the water,
..........a way to learn swimming.

..........Did you come? we ask,
..........her head bobbing above the brine
..........that pours from us. Applause
..........is what we want now,

..........Her wet hands
..........clapping in the last wind
..........before she sinks again,
..........before she holds us again
..........so tight we both plunge
..........like a cry for help
..........into the water,

..........Before we fall to the bottom—

..........Stones
..........not even the fish
..........will pause to tell apart.



(1980) via poets.org