Heart-shaped Rocks

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I watch her, her delicate fingers

Raking a cobbled shoreline of

Jacobsville Sandstone

Rhyolites and basalts

Colored pink salmon

Brown, red, blue and grey.

We’d just made love

But already Superior’s cool waters

Have quickly tamed the

Lava between would-be lovers

Leaving us to wonder,

Has our own love solidified?

She’s searching for hearts

Nature-made;

Igneous from hand-holding

Metamorphic from embrace

Sedimentary from just lying together

Wrapped in arms, nuzzling

Then chip-fractured and 

Notched into twin-lobes by the tectonic forces

In moving slowly against each other 

But smoothened and polished 

By winds and waves

And time.  A lot of time.

“Is this one?” She asks

Holding it hopefully as though

Presentation itself

Cupped as a precious newborn by

A mother’s loving hands

Is enough to make it so.

I take it in my hand and study it. 

It’s heart-shaped undeniably

It’s gritty and hard as keeping love is sometimes.

But the feeling in me— my own heart

It is just a stone.

“This is for skipping!” I answer.

“That’s what I thought,” she said

With a somber tone

That ached her own heart.

I return it to her

And she pitches it awkwardly

Back into the lake

One… two… three hops

Before it vanishes 

Beneath the surface

In concentric rings

That grow, feather 

and fade.

Like the thing we called love does
Sometimes.