I found this piece of an old root that had grown around a pebble in a riverbed at the back of farm. It seemed like a perfect image for this book of poems.

I brought back pebbles in a box. 
For our brief span, their starlike endurance. 
Wary of revolutions, those old soul peddlers,
I kept them within lifeshot − 
yet the pebbles speak only of water 
flowing over them on the mountain, 
and spell out in silence the word forever,
least human of words:
the cruellest, and the most foreign. 


Small stones on the table: 
I sensed there a refusal, 
a stellar eternity holding itself cold and dense. 
I reached out my hand to take them. 
They were warmer than my hand.