I have written about rocks before—
our subconscious desire to return
to our mineral state—
but a recent confrontation with what appeared
to be an artist’s cairn before me in a museum
whispered something else entirely.
Contrivance of “Funeral Cairn” made not
from minerals crushed and heat-formed
over millions or billions of years
but an arrangement out of something
entirely ethereal, through artifice of artist
weaving wet felted wool into stone shapes,
then covering ruse with silk to color and layer
texture over surface, piling one creation
atop another in the way ancients
and American Indians piled rocks to signal
boundaries, to guide, to navigate rivers
by balancing sandstone and granite
along a stream bed, on a natural outcrop,
on an island at the heart of a river or to point
to land trails, and to mark their dead,
as the Narragansetts did to memorialize
their chief Miantonomo, murdered
by Uncas’ brother at the command of Colonials
who later tore down Indian symbolic cairn.
Artists always deconstructing in process
of composing: dyeing wool a yellow hue,
painting blue streaks on white absorbing fibers:
temporal design of mock stone weighed
against eternity—or more precisely,
as eternal as 4 billion years feels
to human life span in this clever trick
of light and substance—
trope of creating then recognizing
signification and altered perception,
trick of light or mind designed
in masterful strokes.
Author/educator Nancy Avery Dafoe has twelve published books through independent presses. She won the William Faulkner/Wisdom award in poetry in 2016. She serves as the NLAPW Letters Chair. Her most recent books include a memoir on grief and love, Unstuck in Time, and a novella on the effect of wars on mother and child separation, titled Naimah and Ajmal on Newton's Mountain.