poetry notebook

Let’s say “stone”. What is meant? Is “stone” a concrete image? Some critics say it is. Let’s pretend some words have “actual” referents (for the sake of fantasy and fun). Even so, does “stone”? What color? What dimensions? How hard?

Basalt? Can stone be basalt even though basalt is a type of rock? When would it become stone? Not “a” stone, as when a small chunk tumbles for a few decades in waves on a beach, say Glass Beach the one the Pacific reclaimed from the old Ft. Bragg municipal dump, a stone you can hold between finger and thumb and, sidearm, skip across the Eel – a stone, distinct from a rock, but still not stone … or is this stone also stone?

If the chunk of basalt’s as big as a black whale, say a sperm whale, jutting out of ice plant (maybe even mesembs, definitely one sporting purple highlights) roots dangling from rain and chipmunk erosion of stony topsoil from its macrocephalus, would basalt then be stone? You’d probably call it a rock, but not one small enough to throw at some one in concert with others to kill out of anger (probably for having sex the wrong way or something)… or for the maenids as they whoop and holler to rain down on Opheus before they dismember.

If basalt were a great wall near Brisbane or another near Taiwan, would it be a stone wall? Basalt columns in Yellowstone to be carved by some future Praxiteles into caryatids of stone? Already stone?

In Thousand Oaks dad lived in a rock house, but not basalt nor hewn from a single rock had walls made of piles of stone, soft in memory, diatomaceous, certainly not marble from the quarry at Carrara.

No, the Great Basalt Wall is a rock wall, neither stone wall nor stonewall.

Basalt tiles are stone tiles, but are they stone any more than the hot basalt stones your aching back took warmth from at a spa? What if, very carefully, meticulously (don’t let it crack!), you chiseled a slice a couple inches thick in a big rectangle, polished it to a mirror, sailed ship with it, and laid it out flat for the Chrysler Building lobby floor… ah, yes! That would be stone! A stone floor even stone cold suits would look at now and then.

But would a sculptor, saying, “I work in stone” mean basalt?

What sort of stone is stone? “Stone” is obviously not a concrete image… but is stone an image of concrete? A smooth, durable, workable building material? Are marble and granite always stone or are they sometimes rock?

Is stone ever sandstone?

If a rock, kicked by a mule pulling a wagonload of parian marble (a single slab and many mules) from a quarry for the Tempio, rolls down a canyon wall, is it stone?

Is stone what hearts are made of? You’ll never break this heart of stone.
Have you seen a virgin block of alabaster lie waiting for a sculptor’s liberating touch? Is this what you think of when you hear “stone”?

A three-figure relief with Eurydice at the Louvre? The Cerberus Metope from the Temple of Zeus? A collossal Hellenistic head of Medusa from the east gate of Beroia?

A color? A texture for your website? A surname?

Or just about 14 pounds?