The White Stone

[hallaig]

By the river’s brown belch Jasmine
finds a pearl, ‘the whitest stone ever seen’.
It’s opaque but some veins and seams
glow with light and hidden streams
of colour. ‘It’s wet, that’s why it shines’.
I zip it up and later put all the day’s stones,
like ‘the snake’, the ‘good writer’ on the cairns
at our backdoor. I try and remember the names,
but within days the mounds seem
as inscrutable as Yutacan,
each the map of a day in a life, fields
of biography as distant and sealed
as Pictish monoliths yet they are here,
these girls, they grow and hop like birds before me
they talk away endlessly
and nothing seems at all lost or temporary
though the stones tell a different story,
each one a locked door, each a wedge in place.