The Stone's Arithmetic

The stone learns its shape through centuries of argument— water's soft insistence, the creek's patient refusal to let anything stay sharp.

It rests in the riverbed, belly-warm against the cold, a small monument to patience, to yielding, to the arithmetic of time that admits no shortcuts.

Sometimes light reaches it in chlorophyll-filtered gold, and for a moment the stone is a jewel, a hidden coronation no one needs to witness.

It knows nothing of the world above, the names we give to sky, the tyranny of standing still— only the soft percussion of becoming smaller, becoming round, becoming home.