Originally Posted by
Mossdog
STONE
When you bought me a milk pan for Christmas
a woman at work said you were as romantic
as a stone. Watching you that evening,
I wondered what stone she had meant:
a chip of carpark gravel or something fancier
like the peridot in my mother’s engagement ring?
My interest in you became geological.
Pulling on your wellingtons to walk the dog in the rain,
you were granite, durable, funereal almost.
Under the water of the bath, you were the agate
I found on Brighton beach as a child, sleek
and mottled as the skin of a seal.
At other times you seemed a rarer gem,
not emerald or topaz, nothing any other woman
would wear at her throat; but plainer, more lovely,
like the limestone walling the caverns back home
that purified the iron in blast furnaces
where keepers dripped jet from their beading brows.
And a man like that would never choose a rose
or a diamond ring, he’d stand for hours in a shop
on the coldest day, testing the unfamiliar weight
of a pan in his hand, assessing its metal,
imagining how the milk would taste on my tongue
as it poured, steaming, from that perfect lip.
Liz Berry
