Cry Patmos Aegean rock! Pilfered off island by a lighthearted friend seeking revelation.
Are there ecstatic echoes in your pockmarks from St. John’s galloping visions? Persecuted,
exiled, John walked among your dark pebbled companions. Perhaps your sea-polished beauty
inspired his poetic summary of what Jesus brought to Jewish tradition—before Constantine converted and ushered in Christianity, as the favored Roman empire religion!

Now we, like you, parading various densities—can wash, roll, sand—our hardheartedness. Compassion’s saw-through of our petrified geodes can be burnished, as we perch on the edge
of inside and outside. Book ends, we squeeze together pages of possibilities.

Granite banana chip
buffed in the creek
near Tony’s Nose
upstate New York,
how modest you’ve
remained. A natural
Jacuzzi near the hut
for a male caucus
to honor a just emptied
family nest. Two sons
and me encamped—
nursing wounds known
and freshly revealed.
Letting them float
down-stream, scratching
the date—forty+ years
ago—on three pebbles
Pocketed, while each
of us earned graduate
degrees in social work,
furniture design and
poetry; lived far flung
in Japan, India, Greece.
Our stories now sluice
digital streams. Sill stone
sentinels mark the silence
windowed around us. In us.