Gravel and Hawk: Poems

Turn to Stone

20 Turn to Stone Once, his road grader crabbed, my grandfather plowed up hunks of petrified wood, huge slabs weighing half a ton it took four and five men to perch on a tailgate, slide toward the cab. Hauled home they made a rock garden, a kidney bed rimmed with meteoric chunks of pale-pink granite, laid with gravel, laced with shale. The featured monoliths, halfburied on end, bristled like monuments. Sparrows and grackles filtered down to land on a concrete birdbath, lit on the stone stumps’ upthrust trunks to wait their turn. Papaw snipered weeds with a sharpshooter spade, edged with a hoe, watching over his boneyard as graver-cum-warden. Mornings, backing down the drive, he’d glide past prehistory before shifting gears, accelerating toward his job of peeling back earth’s crust, exposing its tenderness, to build roads, to pave over some forge-dark inwardness. ...