Fires turned to cold, hard stone,
Joy replaced by nights alone.
I offered you the shore, the sky
You watched in silence, passed me by.
Now I let go of sweet old dreams,
The late-night thoughts, the quiet beams.

The bone dry
hand of stone cutter
works away.
The clink
of metal on stone,
scraping,
dull and full,
How many strikes have they laid
trying to form a new passage?
Humans taking up the work
nature left unfinished.
But they might disagree
saying nature did the hard work
bringing the stone to this point
from a miles deep furnace
and all they’re doing
is hitting a stone.

Marble is cold
like a lover, scorned.
Hard. Cutting.
It rejects heat.

Yet,
If you should touch
that frigid matter,
painstakingly, you can bring it to life;

make it look like there is blood
flooding through that stone.

for Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,
stone's a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:
crossing and vanishing
through their empty names:
water, stone, wind

by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger

Before you left,
I was a paradise,
A magical land of prosper and beauty.
When you left,
The rains stopped coming,
All the magic dried up to sandstone.
Then you came back,
With a river running wide,
Eroding the armored stone of my heart.

So many hotels and monuments,
Nobody looks anywhere but the statues in DC.
But as for me and you,
We look up.
To the stars,
Through the rain,
Far beyond.
I don't know a single soul,
That day dreams about seeing stars in DC.
Though, as for you and me,
We look up.
Beyond the veil of space,
Straight to the sparkling sky diamonds,
Flickering above this stone city.