The Atheist’s Notes on Stone
Notebook: Ovid says that Niobe was turned to stone, and her tears made a
perpetually falling stream, as punishment. She boasted of her seven sons and
daughters, all of whom were killed by Leto’s children, Apollo and Artemis, when she
refused to worship Leto as a goddess with only two offspring. Amphion, Niobe’s
husband, who had raised the city walls with his music, killed himself.
Notebook: The rocks drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world.
Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’
Notebook: The aim of life is death. . . Inanimate things existed before living ones.
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Notebook: The stone is worldless.
Heidegger
Rock I
begin with a stone in a city wall
worldless
stars
I see
died before pre-history
inanimate
grass is grey
longer than green
in a universe of stone
things
mountains cool
to the shape of time but
stone cannot die stars lie
existed before living ones existed
in what distant deeps
living ones
burnt
a stone in a city wall
a stone its own geology
mountain and chasm
existed worldless
O lachrimae Niobe
all tears marble
inorganic veins seal to rigor
those in her warm arms as
the pulse beneath the skin hardens
she is matter
is rock
a stone of the heart
the aim of life
Rock II
its own geology disasters
of ravine gorge and precipice
belong to this stone
thing things
pile around it ice and rock
Niobe
all milk blood tears
from the lovers’ hubris to the mother’s
voluptuary suckling infants
the aim of life
golden boys and girls all carnage
that once
in the avid womb
your hearts’ music
beat to different pulses once beat
Rock III
its own geology strata and striae
ruins of
matter’s pressure on itself
existed before living
heaped around bare and scarred and riven
Niobe
a stone
worldless thing
cannot feel the sun as skin can even when
warmed through and through it brings lizards to bask
without dreams
without a death wish
never alive
worldless
undead stone without
Rock IV
its own geology
is death
shatters a lichen-scarred monolith
seams granite rock-rifted
a flood of ruin
Niobe
cruel logic gods have
deflecting avaricious
libido from
its aim of life of life of life
of life
to death is death
in
sentient in
animate matter
Rock V
its own geology
time has pooled into the crevasse
thousands of years deep
worldless
from yon remotest waste
Niobe
in matter in
animate things
existing before stars
died matter must have germinated
existed before living ones
libido longs to die
because it longs to live
as skin’s membrane grows
forms of deadness
what energy it takes to die
Rock VI
its own geology scored splintered worldless
fragments flung fissured escarpment and mesa
wrecked from chasms of ice on ice ruin gods played with
mangled soil a wall impregnable
Niobe
statues known to weep tears or blood
bring throngs to church’s ancient glooms is death
though tears congeal back
to stone while Niobe’s eroded rock
she once alive now in undead stone death the aim of life is death
Rock VII
its own geology the aim of life strews wastes
of boulder into stonescape painscape
unmaking unlifing undead
limits of the dead and living world
Niobe
worldless wordless
stone hearts will not beat
beat beat
from matter’s ancient turmoil paroxysms
of stone obsidion to sand
Coda to atheist’s notes:
the atheist sees
stone you can see through
originary sands
glass scarcely perceptible shadow of glass
a shell of light on wall or table
you can see through where
windows’ yellow onyx dims striated light
the atheist hears
the cathedral’s
reverberative bell
beats
coalesce stone and sound
to melt in widening circles
each note sounding in the other’s echoes
to make the air liquid with sound and stone
until it tolls them back
to stone relinquished
to gravitas and matter
worked alabaster porphyry the citta’s art
travertine ascends
to figures gesturing in
marble
the atheist began with a stone in an Arezzo city wall
as
Amphion’s notes raised up
his city’s walls with sound
lachrimae
stone cold lips
the lips of the dead colder than stone or clay
the poem’s repetitive Sisyphus rock
rolls back
Isobel Armstrong
