Phantom's face within a stone, shaped like a woman soon to give birth
my fingers explore the rough dips and smooth slopes of its darks
and lights, an imperfect dirt lane off a manicured highway
tri-tones of grey, white-ribbon trimmed across a solid
form-cool to the touch, right for a calming ritual
there’s an ancient pictograph hint to this find.

By sunset I discovered it along this shore where sand sifts fine
and a beached canoe jostles in wavewash, like the upper berth
on a Skeena rail car as it skirts the Rockies in its ritual
circuit while the mountains loom weeping in the Western dark.
My hands sense the secret of the granite’s solid
strength; no ordinary rock, this, to kick off the highway.

A sudden shift, then the sound of hail stones but of higher weight.
My feet secure the safest hold they can find
as shale slides down into the wistful water; this upper ground's more solid
Confidence and serenity recovered, I witness evening’s birth.
The sun’s slipped away as if loosed from fumbling fingers. At almost dark
the ribbon-necked loons start their crying ritual.

Natives launched floating pyres on boats in mournful ritual
over bodies of water on shores such as these. The shoulder off Highway
7 is flagged by the face of the Canadian Shield, but this gouged, dark
mystery stone of mine is small, smells of the earth of ancient finds
and outshines the topaz designate for my month of birth.
It builds my spirits, like the sturdy boulders that make piers solid.

Indented in the surface, here’s the slash of a solidus
reminiscent of the one on the keyboard of daily computer rituals.
Fossils of creatures track death, not birth.
Reminds me of “Beware of falling rocks” signs back on the highway
en route to this secluded scene that time never manages to find
where peace bleaches the memory of the real world's darks.

Self-anchored for her end, did Virginia Woolf escape all her darks?
The Bible advised Christians to set up their houses not on sand, but on solid
foundations. Quality materials these days seem harder to find.
I’ll take home this hard smooth token for meditative rituals.
A talisman to travel by my side for the trip back on the highway.
Something in the essence of endings gives birth.

These oval hollows - the ghost’s eyes, dark from some strange ritual
or her longing to be real and solid? Was she once a live gypsy of the highway?
Answers are not part of this find. Only new questions are birthed.

01/16/2007

Author's Note: a new Sestina

Posted on 01/16/2007
Copyright © 2024 Maureen Glaude