The Michigan Puddingstone

 By Steven Wade Veatch

 

I saw the stone on a long furrow, after the farmer’s spring plow,

like a glob of pudding packed with raisins, nuts, and bits of cranberry.

When I picked it up, I held eons of time.

 

As I wondered how the stone looked long ago, it broke its silence

and whispered its ancient origin, from an era when rushing streams

tumbled rock fragments, in a wild dance over time’s expanse.

 

As the days passed by, slowing water scattered pebbles on sand

and mixed them. Over time the material hardened into a rock

with a chaotic fabric of colorful stones cemented by sugary grains of white quartz.

 

More time, then more time, and with heat and pressure

it became quartzite,

a metamorphic rock,

a puddingstone.

 

And then more change, and the days grew gray, cloudy, and cold,

with dark, blowing winds. Glacial ice crept south and plucked

this stone from Ontario’s bedrock

and carried it away.

 

The climate shifted, the blue ice melted, and the stone released

on a quiet Michigan landscape for me to find 12 centuries later.

I put the stone back down, where agents of weathering

and time will change it once more, breaking

it down to its original ingredients.

 

The puddingstone makes me pause and ponder,

and I am here to say the only true constant

is endless change. Nothing stays the same,

not time,

climate,

the puddingstone,

                        or even me.

An unpolished puddingstone from Michigan. Some puddingstones contain trace amounts of gold and diamonds. These rocks are commonly found just after farmers plow their fields in Michigan. Puddingstones were brought to Michigan by Ice Age glaciers. A Jo Beckwith specimen. Photo by S. W. Veatch.

First published in the Betsie Current.

A Photo at the Museum

 By Steven Wade Veatch

 

I see you in the fading photo looking back at me.

Evidence that shows you lived.

I wonder who you were, touching the world,

learning in a one-room school, following

a deer trail, and then working in a gold mine.

Nothing else mattered. Just years passing by.

You stepped into an unknowable darkness,

then you were gone, and your possessions disappeared—

one

by

one.

As your world collides with mine,

I ask:

What will I leave behind?

A yearbook, a photograph album, postcards, letters.

Will they go to a museum?

Or a dumpster?

Will they fill a cigar box?

I am lucky, I filled

someone’s heart.

A young miner in the Cripple Creek Mining District. Photo circa 1899. Courtesy of the Cripple Creek District Museum.

Beside the Waterfall

Steven Wade Veatch

Fountain Creek rushes 

        Over granite and sandstone

                And plunging falls form

                    Uncovering layers of time

                            Revealing the history of the Earth

                            While beside the waterfall

                                My days flow by as fast

Fountain Creek running through Ute Pass. From the postcard collection of S. W. Veatch