Hi. I'm A. Jay Adler. I write the Substack Homo Vitruvius. I publish in a variety of genres, including poetry, and I so appreciate Tara Penry for organizing this celebration of poetry through her own Substack Quiet Reading. It's the kind of inventive, generous thing Tara does.
Before I share my poem with you, I’ll give you just a little background. While I was enjoying a monthlong stay at the Vermont Studio Center artists retreat in Johnson, Vermont, on a poetry grant, I would spend each very early morning, after rising, in the small meditation house there on a green lawn banking the Gihon River. One morning, I then crossed to the rockier approach on the other bank, right down to the water's edge. I spied a perfectly oval stone sitting atop it's bed of smaller stones. The fresh clear water of the Gihon passed, of course without end, quickly and lucidly over it. I stared for a long time. Then I went back to my room, in a house up the road back across the river, and I sat and wrote this poem.
Originally published in the Tipton Poetry Journal, you can find it not only here but also in my 2021 poetry collection Waiting for Word. I have a dedicated page for the book here on Homo Vitruvius, with a link to it on the horizontal menu atop the page.
And now, with my thanks for reading and listening . . .
A Stone in Water This stone. This water flowing. This flow of water streaming over the stone. You could look at it all day and never stop. How the water endlessly courses liquid and bright. How the stone lies still below. If only every day could be this way in stillness at the bottom of motion with substance at the center of light. You will try to hold it in the palm you stretch between the sediment and sun just to believe you live in the same transparent world; you will hope to preserve in the gladness of your senses (like the blood running through you) the same arresting motion. But the instant you always knew was coming arrives succeeding like all the rest. Now upon now upon now the water flows the stone stays still and you offer your attention knowing this moment, too will last forever.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
Share this post