We've been spending a lot of time at Whidbey lately looking at rocks and I remembered that my dad used to have a rock polisher. I think rock polishing must have been a thing that people did, back when they didn't have the internet or other distractions.
You could always spy a bowl of polished rocks on any given bookshelf in our house. They would show up in the houseplants, and on our fridge with magnets glued to their bellies. One time I sold them at our school's annual cake-walk rummage and bake sale fundraiser. I'm not sure why I sold rocks, and not cake...
Sometimes I would crawl under the dresser or coffee table and sort through them. They were smooth and domesticated-- remarkably different from the seaweed covered lumps we would dig out of the sand at Whidbey-- and you could see every single line shining through and staring back at you, like little eyeballs.
Anyway, I was reminded of this poem by Chris Forhan. It is one of my favorites;
Your father bought it, brought it
to the basement utility closet, waited
while a test pebble tumbled in it.
One week: he’d willed it to brilliance.
The grit kit’s yours now, the silicon
carbide pack. Split it, have at it.
Jasper, agate, amethyst crystal,
it’ll churn to a luster. Listen
to small rocks grind the big one down.
Stones in the driveway, pry them up, why not,
they’ll fit, glass knobs on your mother’s
bathroom cabinet, your baseball
and mitt, polish them, polish that
zero-win Peewee League season.
The thing your sister said and then
took back, you still have it, polish it,
polish the snowless Christmas
when all you’d hoped for was snow.
It’s way past lights out now, you’re crouched
above the barrel, feeding it
your school shoes, your haircut
in eighth grade—flat bangs
to the bridge of your nose—the moment
that girl on the track team touched
your wrist, then kept her fingers there,
the way you loved dumbly
and do. If the sun’s up, it’s nothing,
you’re polishing, you’re pouring in
the ocean rolling rocks into cobbles
too slowly, and the sky, it was
Mozart’s, was Christ’s sky,
no matter, dismantle it, drop it
into the tumbler, and you too, get in there
with your Dad and your Mom and the cat,
one by one, the whole family,
and God’s mercy, perfect at last.
