'I Have a Different Clock'

All of my sons when young went through a geology phase. I did too. My uncle was a house painter and he once had a job in the salt mine under Whiskey Island at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. He brought us fist-sized chunks of rock salt as specimens for our collection. Naturally we licked the samples like deer at the salt lick, and the chunks lost their edges and got smaller. (I can still taste them.) Another time, we visited relatives in western New York who lived on a farm. The pasture behind their house was dotted with chunks of limestone rich in fossils. We took home a bushel of them.

Why rocks? What’s the attraction? They’re common. You find them everywhere. At first, it’s a lazy hobby for the unambitious. There is the aesthetic angle – quartz and other crystals. I took my oldest son to gem and mineral shows and shops, and he fell for bismuth, a crystalline metal. Mica has its adherents, as do slate, pyrite and chalcedony. But something more essential is involved. Rocks feel permanent. They’re older than us, tougher and more enduring, evidence of an earlier, pre-human Earth. Rocks are indifferent. Deborah Warren suggests some of this in her poem “Pressure”:

       

“Put a little pressure and heat on rock,

give it time, and shale turns into slate.

It’s the same with calcium carbonate

slowly reinventing itself as chalk.

“Limestone’s in no hurry; it started to harden

during the Lower Jurassic into marble.

Graphite spends millennia on diamond:

“The luxury of eons.

At any rate,

slow or slower, they move in mineral time

with plenty of leisure for maturing late.

Nice for them. I have a different clock,

skin-shallow. Animals can’t afford to wait.”

Our timeline is brief and accelerated. In his poem “In Praise of Limestone,” Auden calls us “the inconstant ones.” We can’t compete with rocks, though even they are impermanent, if you think geologically.