Poetry vault: Here's the Thing with Rocks

By Zach Hively​

This poem has never been published in the formal sense. Never in a book, a journal, a magazine.
But it means something to me, something maybe that stems from the time I first wrote it, or the way I’ve seen people interact with it. And I do see people interact with it, more than any other poem of mine. Because, while it hasn’t been traditionally published, it’s a poem I’ve put into the world a few other ways.

It took me a while to realize that poetry could exist in ways outside of books and classrooms and poetry readings. This clicked, or started to, when a dear friend asked me for some work to hang in her art gallery.

Words in an art gallery?

This meant words had to become visual, somehow. Even tactile. This, I could wrap my head around, because already I prefer working with poems on actual paper—first handwritten, then typewritten. This forces me to consider the poem as an actual thing, not an easy-to-tweak concept on a screen. Edits happen on paper. So do new thoughts. Then, the poem gets typewritten again.

Inviting in more tactile elements from this place was pretty inevitable, really.

You can snag some poems like this at the Casa Urraca Press stop on the Abiquiú Studio Tour in October.

Maybe this is why the poem hasn’t (yet) appeared in a printed-and-bound book: the rocks, I have to think, would appreciate being presented with flowers and glass.
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Here’s the Thing with Rocks
 
They become who they are
by wearing themselves away.
 
That is the only way for them
to uncover what they’re made of.
 
You can walk right by
the rocks that are greeting you.
 
But if you stop,
try to notice how
 
they are catching their breath
for a time.
 
Erosion is perilous work,
and they are right where they
 
are meant to be,
until they return to the business
of making sand.
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