Oh, how the words twist
and turn,
and sometimes tumble
from our mouths,
as they lift the sky
and swallow the sun.

When the geologist died, his wife held
a yard sale to be rid of the collection
that had weighed her down for longer
than she cared to remember;
I gave her a quarter, maybe more,
(such are the things I'm likely to forget)
for a portion of his bounty:  a handful of small,
water-smoothed rocks, which I keep
on the sill above my kitchen sink,
having carried them with me house to house,
state to state, decade to decade, and bathe
each day to see again what he saw
when he first pulled them from the river.