If nature is God's first word to us before we can even read a Scripture, then surely one way I have experienced God is in my fascination with collecting rocks. It goes well with my other obsession with plants, since the rocks can be lovely additions to the garden or the planter. But as I hope you will see here below, I think they do much more than just add a decorating flair!

Geologos

Rocks. I confess. I have a love affair with rocks.
Not faithful to one, but groping faithfulness
For them all, I -- and we -- strain like blocks
Of wall leaning one into the others to bless
The whole with stability, depend on grace in gravity
The rocks know so well -- even though, at times,
A fine round flat one skips a brevity
And walks on water's surface, climbs
The air, before it settles sweetly in the deep.

Stone-mongering may be my life's best task,
Although these creatures of the earth will keep
Long past my final sleep, I, cornered then, must ask
To hold them for a day, a breath, a life
Then let them pass to find another way
To sun warm in the morning's chill and ending wear away -- strife
For these rocks, a past creation, born of pressure's morphing play
And sometimes sun-flare heat, or spit like watermelon seed from earth's red groin
To rocket high the crusty life we know to join.

I keep them in my pocket now -- one at a time -- where my right
Hand surprised can rediscover their whole, dense solidness -- or
Pull them out to watch and glint in my half-sight
A hint of something bright within, that is before,
Was now, and holds its own. Beyond, for me, my youthful
Breath in Gabriel's angelic mountains, when I
Homed at the feet of Old St. Luke, whose snow-white rule
And crown beckoned my child's light to rise with it, explore, and sigh,
Annunciating births my pocket wombs but cannot hold.

Science's disinterest cannot our relationship design;
The rocks do not experiment with me. But we enfold
In experience, roll up together, to hone a moment fine,
Or more finally, to pound out heart sublime. Carbon dating
Is not our way. I do not use the rocks to list and know
But bow vulnerable and bare my dusty self with them, bating
The holy dirt between us, the mud of us to flow, and to grow
To show us who we were and are to be. I scrape in roughened palm
Obsidian's glass Alice and Narcissus to avoid, expelled with nature's balm.

I finger topographies of basalt, whisper what truth I guess into
Unaccountable holes of limestone, allow the quartzite
Light to laser through my center to discover, perhaps, that I too imbue
Refracted color, bent yet true. A bit of shale crumbles at my touch right
Beneath my wandering boot -- at appointed fissures, turns to dust.
Breathless, these rocks and I explore like lovers first undressed
To discover one another, to plumb love. Amidst the orange rust,
The bodies naked, flawed and cracked w muscle ourselves blessed.
Rock face, stone grace, inanimate trace -- a glance of space where Logos dwells.