Because

Here's another poem from John Ahearn. The only reason I'm putting it on the blog is because it's absolutely beautiful. I'm rapidly becoming a big fan of his, as you can guess.

Pebbles

by John Ahearn

The old abrasions still somehow obtain;
the old assertions and the old replies
become less conversation than refrain,
chipped, fragmentary sentences
eroding in the tidal silences
where everything and nothing signifies,
coffee, afternoon, threat of rain.

Will no surrender, yours or mine, suffice?
Can we never hope for thaw, to weather
like the sea’s cupped ivory dice,
wholly factual and unredeemed
until they tumble down spring streams
to lapidary sand, to lie together,
forget the etched exertions of the ice?

Between us is a bowl of polished stones,
trophies of our summers in the light,
mostly quartz, some agate, a few unknowns,
and one frozen scrap of ancient shale
intaglioed by a fish without a tail,
the patterned absence of an anchorite,
house from which the visitant has flown.

Why do we preserve this remnant clay,
these baubles from the necklace of the sea,
if not to hold their million yesterdays,
save the vestige of a winter mountain in
the seaglass sheen, spine of fin,
see our long, burnishing complicity
revealed, like theirs, as we dissolve away?