Rocks on the property
My land in San Diego is a graveyard of rocks.
I don’t know where they came from or why they’re here.
Landscapers call them river rocks because they’re smooth, burnished by erosion.
But a river? Around here?
Maybe this was once an ocean whose waves polished these stones
That now lie just under the soil where they stop the steel end of my shovel.
They’re the size and shape of a softball, a football, a gourd or maybe a mound of clay
Waiting to be turned on a wheel to become a pot or a bowl, but no hands can mold these rocks
And nature’s hands have already made them beautiful with endless shapes and grades of color.
In back of my house they border the gravel paths that wander between the plants.
They’ve been mortared into stair steps and they cover the steep slopes of a terraced garden,
Sometimes looking like waterfalls that tumble onto the flat ground
And collect at the bottom or surround a newly planted tree.
These stones… they are the land and they are this place
So they’re here to let us build our walls and our steps with a sense and a look of the place.
Might as well because I got tons of those rocks. No shortage whatsoever.
CUL-DE-SAC 
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