Stone Soup
There’s a vision here—between the front bed of tree and bush and the newly mulched bank. I nestle a hopscotch of river rock in grass where I’ll plant soft groundcovers: woolly thyme, ajuga, golden oregano, pachysandra. I see the ramble already, a wild abandon over moony, balding stones. They look so at home, they might’ve lived here a century or more, tended by a humpbacked lady in a floppy straw hat, her hands so worn on the porch of earth you’d think she’d sprung from it, appearing overnight like morels. It’ll take time to work this vision—though less than you think, the whir of seasons a mere drop in my tin bucket. This is how I want every path and secret pocket to flow: natural as a vein, a lithe body, a tributary. At my age, I know I’ll never dig down to Red China, where the people are yellow, or so I was told as I gouged pennies and marbles from dust. Told too, it was Indian money in the gravel, how the first people traded, the petrified beads worth more than I could shake a stick at. I collected those fossils—crinoid sea lilies from the Paleozoic Era, unable to imagine Tennessee as once a vast ocean. At my age, I’ll never be finished with this experiment. I’ll leave the old world hotter and more strayed than I found it. But here, on my postage stamp of land, who am I to pock the sweet ground with stone? How long until the mottled heads darken with winter? What riches lie secreted below, and why do I sometimes wish to hurry life along and nestle down in leafmeal, in grandmama soil, the cool of granddaddy willow, my bony house stirred into neverending?
Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Read more.