Bring Me a Stone

Dorianne Laux

First published in Salt Hill 30 (2013).

When my mother walked
down the tunnel of light
I walked to the shore,

picked up the first stone
I saw: gray, pocked, rough
under my thumb, oval
as my thumbnail, nothing
much to recommend it
beyond its

hardness, its
thereness, its
dull rattle inside

the cage my fingers made
around it when I shook it
like dice
before the lucky throw,

but colorless, numberless,
and the fact that it was once
part of an old largeness:

slab of granite, boulder,
cliff face quelling
the squirming, ceaseless sea,

and knowing
it would one day
cease to be, worn

down by this earth
of blown apart
stars, this

borrowed graveyard.

Oh give me a stone
to carry in my pocket
so it will never be

empty, a stone
to reach in
and touch,
and turn, and take out

in the middle of the night
to kiss, to slip under my pillow

as if

Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection,The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry.