Found Self-Portrait in Wood and Stone, by Clara McLean

Unknown Title, Unknown Artist, San Francisco Bay waterfront (USA) 2020-2022

Found Self-Portrait in Wood and Stone
 
Someone’s been crafting
sculptures where I walk—board,
beam, branch, found or brought
to water’s edge,
wedged at diagonals—at least
twenty of them now, worked
into the rock slope
that braces the bay.
Someone’s labor, this making.
Someone’s scramble and twist,
to get down there, buckle
and bend, ground
squirrels fleeing the crevices.
 
Someone shifted big rocks
to make wood stretch that way
up and out toward the waves
and beyond, like conjuring fingers.
Each plank’s been crowned
with a delicate placement
of stones, sometimes other things, too--
lichen, plaster, acacia, an old shoe
can-can-ing the cloudline on one long propped branch.
 
This one’s a shrine, maybe;
this one tiny pi, cross-stroke
wind-wobbling.
Some bear stones equidistant
as companionate shorebirds
that line the seawall.
This one offers
a bunched stone bouquet.
 
They say: there you are--
walking, looking. They say:
igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic.
They say, see what our hands do: defy.
There’ve been times these past years
when, wedged between crises,
smoke-sky hanging so heavy
it obscured the near mountain
like the brown belly of a horse
settling down on our heads,   
 
I’ve gone there and looked
to that balance--
outcast wood, stones              
standing on end.
They say: crossbow, cairn, crucible.
They say: talisman. Totem.   
Wait, lift,
and place.       
A coin at the tip
of your thumb.
 
Clara McLean

Clara McLean lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Earlier poems have appeared in Rattle, Cider Press Review, Terrain.org, Foglifter, West Trestle Review, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among other publications. https://www.claradmclean.com/