Prayerstone

When she was ten and her father lay

pallid and curled in a bed

that buckled at the waist and knees

she went to her room and

hugging herself, set her will

against his death like two hands

braced on the boulder they'd seen

near Lake Placid. Kidney-shaped,

the great rock stood

in an open field, lichens slowly

inscribing blue-green and mustard

circles on its face and shoulders.

"An erratic," they said, explaining

nothing. Determined to budge it

she was determined, if only an inch.

An inch was all her father required

to free his life from the musty vault

under that granite slab,

a fissure she would open

with the fervency of her mind.

No mere prayer was this.

After he died she felt

not that she had been too weak

but that her resolve had faltered,

betrayed by thoughts

which could already imagine him gone.

How they tugged at her hands

like little children

peeling back her fingers

one by one. Then she remembered,

water had carried that stone

lifted it and carried it

all the way from Quebec

nestled in the body

of a frozen sea:

A miraculous voyage.

An earlier version of this poem appeared in Nimrod International Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 ("The Healing Arts," Spring/Summer 2006).