Rock From The Foothills

trcmblay 51 Bill Tremblay Rock From The Foothills Dull with oxides of arctic coastlines, the ocean bottom when all trees had gills, the rock signals like a colony animal, a chlorophyll acropolis, each of its lichen cells a radio life breathing green light. When I carry it, it feels like many lives, each grain a memory, a generation, a silicon person, its lifted prow like a banked choir. A razor could enter its cracks, the darkness inside, the rooms where we hoisted huge rolls of cloth, sweating steam from dye vats, orange sunrise nylon cut & sewn into parachutes swaying down the closed-down sky to my aunt, looking at my mother in the coffin, saying, She looks like a spoiled brat because her father dead at 33 from tuberculosis & no child labor laws & alcohol trying to save his living imagination made my mother his little queen & my great grandmother "Le Sauvage" the Iroquois sorceress gave the evil eye to the working-class canuck idea that good equals safe. This rock makes different sounds when hit — my uncle's small fist makes a cancer sound, a factory whistle demanding we be "realistic" makes the sound of my aunt's children, stillborn, crying to get out. ...