Petoskey Stone
(Hexagonaria pericarinata)
Carol Was
Glacier-plucked from bedrock,
dropped in Good Harbor Bay,
the small hexagons were domiciles
for trilobites, clams, fish, built
millions of years ago atop one another
like Anasazi cliff cities abandoned,
chambers linked on all six sides,
polyps of living tissue, colonies
of miniature wombs giving birth
in the warm shallows of a Devonian Sea.
Tiny silt-filled mouths, petrified
conglomerate of eyes sewn together
in a mud-filled quilt of rock, every
stitch a tentacle for pulling in plankton,
every cell like a word with a life of its own
needed to make sense of the whole,
such little creatures never knew
how imperative they were.
350 million years of a volatile earth,
storms, fires, eruptions, occluding
layer upon layer to bury this stone
now sitting motionless on my desk
sculpted into a paperweight, takes
its name from an Ottawa Indian, Petosegay,
“Sunbeams of promise,” like words
of a poem on encrypted terrain.