Stones are the First to Rise

In Stones Are the First to Rise, Buddha, a U.P.S. driver, and an old woman living in hill country shares space and time with stones and peas and war and climate change, plus explorations of childhood and becoming a particular person. Throughout many of his books, Giannini finds himself working with discrete sets of concerns over the course of months or years, concerns that nevertheless cohere as a single envisioning, a book, as the parts of the body cohere to make body. Antonio Porchia’s well-known words are appropriate here: ＂I know what I have given you. I don’t know what you have received.＂ The book is now in your hands.

Stones Are the First to Rise

The stones talk to each other, just as we do. . . .

- Katsumahtauta (U.S. West Coast tribal elder)

to anthropologist-linguist Jaime de Angulo

1.

Rain pushing the night down

through melting snow,

entering earth

and we felt safe enough

after the storm.

We stayed in the ground.

Night could then be turned over

in the morning. . .the dark clods

and puddles with clouds we didn’t crush.

Night was coming up through the soil

and vanishing.

Among our kind, that same small stone

turning up, as it did every year,

always rising before us, blind eye

in the night of dirt. Filthy

with what it couldn’t see,

as a child without a mirror can’t see

its smeared face. Nothing Romantic

or playful. Nothing green. Ancient.

It seemed without knowledge

of what or why it was, surfacing

A man began telling

the crushed stones

in the truck-bed

each had the right to remain

silent. Not one listened.

Then they were lifted

higher and higher,

dumped

loudly into their gray language,

their heaped syntax

(no one could decipher)

on the ground. ’One rake

deserves another, ’ said a worker,

as she and co-worker began

spreading sentences of granite

until the whole story became clear:

the fresh path we could walk

listening to the small nouns,

the ancient ones, turning under our feet,

how they depend, as we all do,