Smooth

Smooth from centuries of the same argument — water against stone, water winning, always, but so slowly that the stone doesn't notice until it fits in the palm of your hand and someone's child puts it in their pocket. I collect them. River stones. This is either a hobby or a problem, depending on how many you have. I have many. A bowlful on the windowsill. A jarful by the door. A boxful in the attic that my wife calls my geological shame. Each one was a mountain once. Or part of one. Limestone, granite, schist, the occasional basalt that you can tell by the weight — heavier than it looks, volcanic, traveled. The river near our house is modest. A walker's river, shallow, crossable in summer by stepping on the larger stones and only sometimes falling in. I've fallen in three times. Twice was carelessness. Once was the dog. The stones on the riverbed are the ones still working. Still being shaped. The water runs over them and they lose something invisible each day — a molecule, a grain, the smallest possible amount of themselves — and become more of what the river wants them to be, which is round. The river wants everything round. Edges are a problem the water solves with time. It's the only tool it has: repetition over duration. It can't hurry. It can only continue. I've been married twenty-eight years. There's a metaphor in there and I'm not going to make it because my wife reads my poems and she'll know which of us is the water and which is the stone and I'll never hear the end of it. The bowl on the windowsill catches the morning light. The stones are warm by noon. I pick one up sometimes and hold it and think about the patience of water and the stubbornness of rock and the strange fact that they need each other to make something this beautiful.