Stone Tool

Jennifer Maier

For years it’s been here on my desk,
the stone pestle the Tlingit woman
set down two centuries ago
beside the cedar bowl and the waiting grain.
She must have heard her girl crying in the yard
or her man whistling up from the beach below
and set it down without thinking,
the way you set down a needle or a word
—as if it will actually wait for you!—
not leap to the beak of some laughing bird
the minute your back is turned
or roll to your toddler’s imperial hand
asking to be flung—

And I can see this would have been
her best one, the shaft hewn by the rhythms
of laboring women, the head worn
smooth as beach rock by the tides
of the harvests.

When they left camp it stayed behind,
a tuber of memory in the dark ground,
keeping its tale of feeding and plenty
until the morning my blue-eyed grandmother
turned over her spade,
and we laughed at the way a thing
disappears until it is ready to find you,
until it is hungry for use.

Visit Jennifer Maier as Image Artist of the Month for August '07

Issue #33• Winter '01/'02