The Stone Carver
I call it Laughter’s Child, this marble head.
Who was the boy, you ask?
Who knows! Who knows!
One flash of a face in the street he was,
one glimpse
as he passed my open workshop door—one blink,
lit by a shaft of sheerest dazzling joy
at his mother’s hand—
so bright with love complete,
he blazed me awake to vision.
Just that glimpse,
then gone in the dust, in the noise, in the faceless crowd.
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More than a year I worked, chipped and carved,
for the boy’s face to rise out of the stone,
as though that stone were the soil and seed of joy.
A shapeless lump of rock,
but the face was there,
those lips pulled wide with glee, his eyes—
those eyes—
hunched in the marble, waiting for me to strike,
poised for that flash of terror down my hands,
down to the gravid rock,
my midwife stroke—
burning to crack that stone-bound laughter awake;
then steel on stone, chisel and point and rasp—
But who was the boy, the mother?
Gone in the crowd.
I have paced those hard streets,
the shops and alleys,
but never since have seen nor heard of them,
nor heard again that wild trill of glee.
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The people, they wander in to watch that head,
to warm themselves at the boy,
my laughing boy.
Look! How they stare at his eyes that are gazing up
to his mother’s smile.
They straggle in from the street
just to look. They tell me his eyes are fixed
on God, on Jesus, on ranks of angels aflame—
on all their hopes, on all their vast loss.
They call him The Prophet Child.
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Step here, where we can speak.
That older man
who stands there still, staring at the boy’s face,
his eyes fast to the boy’s eyes, his hands
tremulous, clenched—do you see?
He has fallen to me,
and now he is mine. Alert, alive in my gut,
his image snared—no longer lost in the world,
bur seized and saved as once I seized that boy—
his image cries to me: This! This is your task.
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Do you see? Beneath this cloth—no fine white stone,
clear, like laughter’s pure boy—but gray
and laced with darker lightning?
Right! That man,
that sum of all those wanderers wandering in
from the shrill streets,
he will join Laughter’s Child.
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My vision knew, as a falcon knows its prey,
gave me the boy for the sake of the old man’s gaze
at the boy’s eyes, the Prophet Child’s eyes
where the old man caught some light that you nor I,
nor he, nor all our worlds could ever bear
except as a flash, except as a glimpse of love
in the roaring crowd, somewhere, a blink in the dust.
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