WATER FROM STONE

There is something that passes for love
    that is but a leaf, a hot coal.
There is something that passes for duty,
    that is but autumn, then winter.
There is something that does not pass, that is
    a boulder. Lodged in the belly
it does not grow, fall off the tree, crumble
    into ash. It does not turn
to daffodil or summer squash, but weighs in.
    When you step on the scale, you know -
you carry this stone. And sometimes, you'll weep.

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see photos from Bamboo & Bone in performance.

more poems by mallie boman

DESERT DREAMS Like a great furnace, he stokes his mind with the coals of vision. Refused decrepitude, he dreams God's voice in a place hollowed out with age, sits with eyes turned towards the desert's heat - as if he might shimmy from his own body, linger between sand and sun a radiant mirage that could shed the snake not as skin, but as soul. From the silence of her morning bed Sarah reaches out for him for the taste of fur, a touch of wrinkle the coolness or heat that would be Abraham. If you look at the camel, you know he is God. If you listen to the desert, you can hear it sigh. But now, before death, her husband wants to know a singularity, a containment shared, not squandered amongst beasts and dust - If there was an ocean, perhaps he would die into the brine, plant God there instead of heaven. Sarah forgave the past, but what else would he deliver from this last inch of life? All follow him and now her baby the beloved son, a coal in the bosom of a furnace. And Sarah rose. Knowing with donkeys gone and the smirk of a servant, Sarah knows. She will make an infusion bitter, more than the bile on her morning tongue. And in the dawn she brews the maternal words, Let him live, as she winds a sighing shawl tightly around her.   top of page