Even
a lonely man who
has
never married, whose
only
fragrant memory
ended
in Venice,
suffers
the need to bury
his
loved ones.
Geppetto’s
sister drowned
in
her lover’s arms,
and
while the lover held the body
and wept in
caricature, it was Geppetto
who
dug the grave
and
buried her bones.
It
was while digging,
his
tears weakening the soil,
letting
the spade slide in
like
a lover, that Geppetto found
the
stone; a single stone
amidst
the grit of earth.
Once
a mountain, yet
too warm to have reached
such heights, a comet? A
tear, perhaps,
from a fierce Goddess,
shed when the fairest had fallen
to lowly treachery?
Geppetto
reached out his hand
and
lifted free the stone,
defyied
gravity, disregarded
the
strange stares
of
his sister’s lover
and
her gathered friends.
After
he studied the stone
for
a moment, while
the
crowd murmured and fidgeted,
he
plopped it
into
his white shirt pocket;
felt
the weight of it match his heart.
He
kept the stone as company
through
evenings and days
as
a marker to
his
sister’s memory, not knowing
that
its proximity to his sadness
instigated
change.
Under the weight of his heartbeat,
the
stone began to believe
it
was a seed
and
waited with the patience of rock
for
the log
to
give it birth.
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