I laugh at the way I hunt stones at the beach, but tonight I really look at them, fifty of them laid out flat on a fold-out table in my apartment on the Atlantic.

I’m sitting up in bed, my little laptop on a pillow that rests on my legs, the only light in the room a spotlight on the stones. They’re just to my left. They angle into one another on top of a white kitchen cloth, their striations making them — as I’ve learned to call them — graphic stones. Also lucky stones. Lined stones, graphic stones, lucky stones. Lucky if their white stripe wraps itself all the way around the stone. A lot of mine are like that.

I have my own names for their variants — the white stones with yet whiter lines I call Tres Leches; the tan stones with tangles of raised lines I call Hot Cross Buns; the rare black stones with pale veins I call Cy Twomblies.

One stone – a large gray
oval with concentric white
lines up and down – I call
Pere Ubu, because
it reminds me of this picture:

And really, though I laugh,
stones are sacred, and have
been sacred, to so many for
so long. Mine aren’t sacred
stones, but I handle them
a certain way, seek them
out with a certain seriousness,
and find their texture, heft,
shade and shape — and what
the water and the weight and
the calcite have written on them
— moving.

***********************

A lot of it is the ritual. The special green gloves for brushing the sand off so I can put them clean in my pockets. The afternoon departure, when the sun is just so and the tide washes over the stones and makes them shine. I dart back and forth like a sandpiper as the water approaches and recedes. I cast my eyes quickly over twisting paths of stones as I walk (I keep a good pace — this is a walk), noting only stones of a certain size and smoothness and presence, and then lean down, pick one up, and hold it to the sun.

I marvel at the mosaic shapeliness of the beach itself. The sort of beauty I’m seeing in the long tossed up curving paths of granite and basalt provokes a satori… Roland Barthes, writing about Twombly’s painting and artforms like it, describes a satori as a moment of blissful astonishment at a seemingly negligent, random gesture that somehow becomes supremely aesthetic.

And of course there’s everything else around me — The cold rush of the ocean, the sky’s graphic contrails, the colonies of motionless gulls. My pockets become heavy with stones, and I keep my hands in my pockets and move them over the stones as if the stones are worry stones.

Now I sit on a boardwalk bench and examine each stone yet again, tossing back onto the beach one that’s too small, another whose lines are strong but whose surface is rough, and another which looked beautiful wet but lost its looks in the sun.

Back in the apartment, I wash each stone again and then consider its seams and its quartz alongside the pebbles already there. It’s lyrical.