text work

Making Monuments

1.
 
The whole of the waiting stone is beige coloured.
It is hiding its silica, their minutiae. Although I
 
have found dashes of it left as glitter on things,
things like tables, chairs. My own face glitters with it.
 
I gather up the gaudy granite slivers, they flake like
brittle lizard skin mottling in my hand, there.
 
I can hold this smooth round pebble, and warm
it through. It is stone silent not budding from or
to anything,
 
but I can feel its waiting.

2.
 
I cannot get into them. Laying the flakes out onto a table,
or holding the fragile layers in my hands, peeling them back
layer from metallic layer.
 
They are big as skin, bigger than. They’re stone cells,
the living and the not living tissue of stone.
 
They are the skin cells of stones. They glitter in the
black muck, the wet and humus muck of my garden.
They decorate the bones of the nestled reed music,
the flares and tubes of the bamboo that was hacked to
death and tied with meat string,
 
and I remember how bamboo’s music changed when the
poison worked down from leaf to root, and still, they
stilled their rushing noise until it bubbled underground,
 
its hollowing sound.
 
It is impossible to dig the tubes out, they generate,
make their generations, gardens away.
All round the hurt tubes are glitters of stone cells.
 
Moon caught, or sun, they fight with dew to blade my eyes.
Stone remnants. I lick my index finger and glitter them.

.
3.
 
Their crystal greys are almost invisible,
littering the paths where colour is,
 
a blue bird is stone dead,
nesting season is vicious. Wind lifts
his blue,
 
minutely investigates the small
corpse and moves on,
 
the blue against the grey
and the crystal beneath,
 
not the sun, not the moon exposes
the glittering of this new fossil’s making.
 
‘Making Monuments’ is © Christine Murray

• ..Amazon Link to Brain Of Forgetting V1, ‘Stones’