The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen.
I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was at it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear - she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

Annie Dillard

Mots clés beauty wonder memoir discovery rocks geology rock-collecting

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Meltwater (from the book Blue Bridge)

Up here. A face
Loses its lines

I look to see
The colour of your eyes …
They have turned
To water.

I lean forward
To catch
The scent of your hair –
All I smell is heather.

I touch your hand
And all I feel is earth and stones.
There is nothing left
But the hillside’s breast

Your flesh and bones
Have vanished.

Jay Woodman

Mots clés water flesh rocks bones blue-bridge

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