Stones Atone, Don't They?

Stones Atone, Don’t They?

But roughly but adequately it can shelter

what’s within (which after all

cannot have been intended to be seen).

It is the beginning of a painting,

a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument,

....  Watch it closely.

                                    Elizabeth Bishop

                                    “The Monument”

We need them, I suppose, those stones

whose mien we see in the trees from far

off as small cities of sleep,

vaults of profound endings.  Except

she’s not ending at all, or even beginning to,

she’s just going down into it or under,

slipping inside a tiny whirl-

pool and maybe it catches her hair first

and pulls her back, two grasps, the foot

or the face and it’s too late to close

her mouth.  As for me, I’d never imagined

there’d be something like this after

all, the watching her sink gently

at first, then hour after hour until it’s just

a gesture, a wisp of smoke I’d only be

able to hold if I breathed in at the right moment

—but I was

there, I’d been left there almost alone

and she was dead already, even though

she was still breathing, had left

the room and tried to go home

with my father, but he couldn’t carry

her and my brother and my sister he couldn’t

carry all of them, his wife and his mother too

and it makes me debate if such

desertion can be atoned entirely.

Maybe all this time I’d been stupefied

by the whisper of the privacy

curtains, the slow

rise and decline of her breathing, and I

wondered:  what can be built that won’t be entirely

abandoned?  How is penance cut

for the dead in and out of the lean solidity

of a quarry of air?