Stone Carrier, Salish Territories

When lightning touched stone there was no love there.

Instead it was a kissing. Forces have no lips nor fingers & yet touch intimately, one electron recognizing another.

Once met, only the stone remained, that loose, temporary knot of how-things-are; once grounded, white-sky, the sprite, unraveled in the particle sea.

Even the stone has now become a pebble, the rest of the rock, mountainous, devastated with time: a mountain over time, shards, sand, its calcite dissolved. Somewhere, calcium ions, in a bone (in a hawk leg say)

or riverbed racing, storm to the sea. Down below in a temporal corner, a woman. Now walking, now driving;

of no consequence to the long spent sprite, nor to the pebble—even if—her leg-bone walks

carrying in its marrow errant ions.