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Margaret Gibson
House of Stone and Song
for David
I
To lie very still, held at the dark margin of the morning,
dwelling
nowhere—
who is not glad to be alone like this? More bare than
and prayer can pray me. Or to wake first, in just light
as
one by one the birds
raise their cadenzas and solos, chips of song
da capo, delicato, fuoco—far off and near, random
layer
of song in my ear,
bringing withindoors stubble field and swamp oak,
mist in the hollows and wooded ridges. Spires of dark cedar.
The
shadblow, the yellow
blur of the willow by the shallows. Bringing withindoors
cantabile, acciaccatura, hermit brown, red-winged
or
hooded, green-throated
or blue, burnt sienna, rose-breasted or bronzed,
the pure wild sound of the world.
By the window the lilac, not yet full out, slants
to
a thicket of shadows
thrown on the bedroom wall. On a shadow branch
the tiny shadow of a bird, lilac the tremor of its throat,
lilac
the scent of its song,
and the roof of this house hovers over me like wings.
Now I know, without having to see it, how the pond fills
with
milk, with saffron,
with the whole sky’s intimate incandescence.
II
Chip, chip, chip—now a sound of metal on stone,
not
a bird, it’s Barry Patch,
stonemason, lover of stones and the uses of stone
for
the dead, for the living.
Goonies, potatoes, bones my husband calls the stuff
of
the walls he builds at the margins
we’ve cleared from the woods. He tells me
not
to steal the words,
so I give them back to him here as field stone, blue stone
the
granite and gritrock
we’ll walk on when Barry finishes his work—
which
now resembles, in the early
stages of labor, ruin—dug trenches and red string, rubble
that’s
maybe useful, maybe not,
all the markings of a dig, as at Xochicalco. In the ruins
one
sees plainly
the power of the unfinished. The stones whisper, Know
what
we aspired to know, do what we dared
and couldn’t, complete us, the fierce glyphs burning into
sky,
a smudge of bougainvillea.
Chip, chip, chip—Barry’s squaring one stone to fit
close
on another, each one
finding its place in what we might call patio, terrace,
moon-watching
pavilion,
a room whose roof is air. Barry builds it on shelf rock,
on sand and stone dust,
keeping us part of the broad ledge of cedars and laurel—
anchoring
us, much as the house
we love on Bear Run, Fallingwater, is moored over
impermanence
and falling asunder.
And I think, moving now into a morning of tasks
I
can and cannot finish with,
how soul must be something unfinished, or never begun,
or
lapsed. Must be no thing at all,
at best attentive, a flowing attempt to form walls
around
a small glint of light,
that hint of abundance momentarily flashing, rarely
up
close, barely sensed—
if sensed at all, so likely misapprehended one keeps on
inquiring—if
only into the next room,
where
the secret is, hidden behind
stone walls, disclosed within undivided light and air.
III
Because we live in a country where no one I know
sings to God in the streets,
I’m given to wandering past margins of fern and wild honeysuckle,
following the burr of the tanager, that lazy, drowsy,
dozy buzz of triple notes
tied close together. I’m tethered and led, legato
deeper in, beyond cedar field and hardscrabble, through
grapevine, bull briar,
globes of rhododendron and laurel lamp-lighting my way
over Indian graves and wetland, hellebore and hummock,
into the tall trees where
that flash of pure fire finds its high branch summer niche.
Perhaps I want to be the crazy woman
who lives on roots and berries
in the only woods abandoned to her, perhaps a woman
inhabited, immersed, left open to the rain, a lit fleck
in the black eyes of the doe
who does not startle at the sight of me, a praise song
composed by the tail end of a snake as it slithers into the rocks,
by the scattering of raw light
through the oak leaves—a generous rubble—
by the coyote’s treble and the wild turkey’s guttural call
taken in, this earthy music
dowsed for in the deep well of the woods, tasted,
taken into my body, alone and full, wind and stream.
IV
But yours, wise sojourner, is the art of recollection—
after home-leaving,
homecoming,
bringing with you “something perfect for the kitchen,”
for the table a blue bowl, for the mantel a Tibetan
oil lamp cast as the body of a bird.
You rescued once a weathered piece of a push broom
from along a railroad track,
the bristles gone—
but
the pattern of absence
ground in there, and the patina of the seasoned wood . . .
It takes a quiet eye to see, a single heart to love.
Blessed are the single ones . . . for you shall find
the Kingdom. You came from it,
you shall go there again.
And so you put a road to nowhere through these woods
that were once abandoned fields
and
built this house.
You dowsed for the well, and when we married
in the living room, after the few words we’d planned,
you took my face into your hands and looked
and looked, in your eyes such a shining it startled me.
To be so recognized.
To
be found.
As when wind catches up the sun and billows it
across dark water—such a shining
that we are held and sent forth at once.
Something flashes out, who can say what it is?
In its wake
a
net of light to catch our words,
and the words still holding us here.
V
When by accident he struck the stone, and it fell open,
as a book will,
half
by half,
Barry saw the stones were a pair of wings, matched
exactly, and he set them
soaring,
in.
“House of Stone and Song” first appeared in our Spring
2001 issue and was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize XXVII: The
Best of the Small Presses (2003).
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