A Fantasy on Skipping Stones -- 4/19/24

What is that knocking upon the firmament? A long slumber, it seems, sees me dislodge my infinitely articulable frame from its celestial couch in the infinitude, sending planets, radiation, and dust that have wedged me in on new trajectories as would baffle observation. From that distant orb, the youngest in my concern, does this meagre entry in the ledger of significance reach my ear. Rubbing just at the many organs of my sight does the vision of that planet come clear from a blurry field of green and tan and blue. I see a man upon the strand, dressed in fine plum slacks, purchased in the spirit of vainglory, but which have been given no greater occasion than a stroll through town, park, wood, and sand afford. This figure has cast a stone across the lake, evidenced by the ripples’ and spray’s run and fall while the spinning stone, retarded by its delightful incidence upon the surface, descends waveringly in the instant of my observation toward the bowels of Lake Michigan. Its thrower wheels from where he sunk on knees and sand to effectuate the throw, puts his hands into the pockets of the plaid jacket, green, and lately washed in lanolin, and walks in ignorance of his false solitude, kicking at the stones to find another prospect. A second throw goes better than the first, finding flats between the guileless rises to patter thrice, as I heard it, upon the instrument of the firmament.

A third cast of stone is the finest yet, skittering at its tail end several times, curling until it meets the resistance of a wave, into whose embrace it nestles and is subsumed, as I do and am upon my couch. Thoughts of no pronunciation does the man harbor as he takes the walkway up the ravine, stopping once to observe a mallard. Together do we ponder resolutely if that duck, paddling about in some shallows near a storm drain pipe, ignorantly collects pollutants in its form. Diving after a bauble of one kind or another, or after a mote more natural, it bobs about in the energy retained by its own presence in the puddle, whose fluids curl about its form and run from its feathers. These beings, from a need to oil their machines, defile their ducks, thinking they no longer have a use for them. There go their driving machines. There goes the man across the road, into the harbor of trees. Well, I think, if the light of man and duck reaches me, they have alike been dead for centuries, interred in the bowels of my indifferent and constant neighbor Time, and I pull a blanket of the cosmos about me and turn to dream.