Poem: A Stone in Water

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…