The hot rock catching noon now
does not shine, keeps its reflections
elsewhere. Pores remember low
prophetic clouds, inland intonations,

fifty thousand years of roll downhill.
Today, this far from the recondite rib
it departed, it is part absent,
flat underfoot. 

The purple purr of Sunday languor
had grown intolerable. We went
to land’s wet edge. The slate
had promised something instant.

But there’s that pitted stone
perseverating on its long silt slip down
in rivulets,
a one-way salmon—

The granite ripple of the hills behind us
has been and will be coming a long time.
My daughter blots the slate’s forgetfulness,
finds the police chalk of a nautilus.

The other way, irascibly, the boy
takes and hucks the rock far out to surf.
We follow on the frayed cuff of its arc,
the present never having been enough.

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