Revisionist Poetry – “The Day the Stones Learned to Balance” – Uncertain Sculptures, v.6 (A cosmic daydream conversation…)

Note: I reworked this one while reading Italo Calvino’s masterpiece, “The Complete Cosmicomics”. I got inspired to write an absurdist conversation between the builder/narrator and… well, everything else in the poem…

At first, the river had no opinion about stones.
It simply carried them, as it carried everything else,
with the distant manner of a clerk
who has misplaced a very important document.

But one afternoon, while I was crouched at the bank
choosing pebbles for my project,
the smallest stone cleared its throat.

“Excuse me,” it said,
“but why are you lifting us into the air like this?”

I was surprised, not because stones had spoken
—by then I had long since accepted that nature
was full of unannounced arrangements—
but because its tone was that of a person
who had been appointed to a committee
without consenting to the appointment.

“I am building a sculpture,” I said.

The stone considered this.
“Temporary or eternal?”

“Temporary,” I replied.

“Ah,” it said, relieved.
“Then you may proceed. Eternal things are unbearable.
They monopolize all the weather.”

So I chose another stone,
an oblong one with a dignified forehead,
and placed it above the first.
At once they began discussing gravity
as if it were a rather clumsy relative
who arrived uninvited and spilled soup on the floor.

The river watched in silence,
which is how rivers express approval,
or indifference, or strategic patience.
The sun spread itself over the bank like a gold napkin.
Even the insects seemed to pause,
as though waiting for the outcome
of a philosophical experiment.

The stones, however, were discovering something.

“We are not being held,” said the second stone.
“We are agreeing.”

This astonished me.
I looked more carefully, and saw it was true:
each stone did not merely rest upon the one below,
but made a small and necessary concession
to the existence of all the others.
Balance, I realized, was not the absence of instability
but a truce negotiated at the edge of collapse.

Soon the tower grew taller,
and with each new stone the conversation became more elaborate.
A flat stone developed opinions about architecture.
A rounded one claimed to have always suspected
it was destined for philosophy.
The river, perhaps offended by this upward ambition,
sent a wandering current to inspect the base.

The whole structure trembled.

“Do not panic,” said the smallest stone.
“We have been through this before,
in other arrangements, under different names.”

And then, quite suddenly, the tower stood.
Not forever.
Not even for very long.
But long enough for the world to notice itself
becoming briefly, improbably, elegant.

When it fell, it did so with tremendous dignity,
as though gravity had finally been invited
to the proper ceremony.

I laughed. The stones laughed too,
or perhaps that was only the sound of them returning
to their original opinions about the ground.

Still, I have gone back to the river many times.
The stones remember me.
The river pretends not to, which is its way of being kind.
And each time I build again,
I am reminded of the strangest truth of all:

that the universe may be held together,
for one shining instant,
by things that have no business holding together
and yet somehow do.