Boulders and Bedrock
- Boulders and Bedrock
1
Let me walk my sadness to those bouldersdownslope from my window —
do I hear them whisper? Does reliefrest in stolidity?
2
One story starts with a minister walking on a scarpuntil a pound-him-down rainstorm catches him.
He squeezes into a gap in a limestone cliff.From this he wrote the “Rock of Ages” hymn,
let me hide myself in thee what I hear,newer in lyrics like shelter from the storm.
These rocks ground me —erratics that glaciers dumped one by one
like excess burdens refugeesditch in the desert night.
3
Pines root here.Garter snakes hide in weathered slate.
I come for comfort in silence.You who abide in kinship [End Page 147]
with green mountains, the grasses, the pinesthat are swept up in changes we never saw coming.
That minister is long-slabbed dead. The cleft remains.I too am an erratic: hulking and afraid. The rockface
does not ask of today, What of yesterday? [End Page 148]
Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet and tree hugger with a strong interest in geology. Her collection How I Learned to Be White (Antrim House, 2018) received the 2018 Human Relations Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry. Her chapbook Checkered Mates came out in 2021 (Kelsay Books). Let’s Hear It for the Horses (The Poetry Box, 2022) is a third-place winner in the press’s annual chapbook contest. triciaknoll.com
