Robert Bly

The Translucent Stone

It is a stone that fits into my three fingers. It rests on the thin bed of the main finger, and the pointing finger is always ready to receive some orientation from it, petting its side from time to time. The lower underside of the stone rests on my ring finger, as well it might, for that is the finger of faithfulness, able to hold strange objects for decades.

If the fingers turn it completely over, then we see another mysterious surface, a few spots partly transparent, other spots cloudy white like milk clotted on the bottom of a pan. . . and in its confused solidity there is no hint that there might be a curious prayer room inside, that place where a hermit could sit, his or her head touched by the hairs coming out from the center of the earth. All solids are washed in its acidulous flowings like those little spears of feeling that leap out of the Valentine poem made by the tenth grader.

And the colors, a pale, crystalline ivory, what is not edible will never have the brown of dung. When hit with a pen, it gives off the solid clack of the pool ball made because human beings could not tolerate the immense length of the elephant's tusk. And what the elephants used for fighting people wanted to use for play. The elephant's great, huge-hearted aggression the humans cut up into small units of oppression.

An old gardener once said to me, "If there's a rock in the center of the pond, the carp will circle around it. But if there's no rock at the center, the carp don't eat well and they don't thrive."