The Stone My Grandson Gave Me
Bright yellow, like his hair, and shadowed, the one side
flat so it could rest here on my desk, a simple fragment
of something bigger, something it seems now heaven-sent,
waiting for us on the sidewalk, where his blue eyes spied
it as we strolled together down the town’s one wide
maple-lined street toward the old brick church, where he meant
to race down the length of the muddy grass embankment,
then charge up the neo-Georgian porticos and hide.
Jacob’s angel, I thought to myself, being of that mind
that can glimpse—like you and you—the wondrous world around.
For you, he shouted, running up ahead. Call it—what?—a kind
of currency? Or—better, maybe—something the very ground
had yielded up this day, anno domini, which the kid had signed:
a thing turned diamond after all these years, as it waited to be found.
