An Unexpected Intimacy by D.M. Black

This afternoon I picked up a warm stone
– I was wanting to fix a hole that had appeared in the pathway –
and I had to check a sudden urge to apologise,
as if I had inadvertently
intruded on something to which my wants were entirely irrelevant.
I seemed to have broken in on a life that had been in progress for millions of years,
always uncelebrated, always in private, through heat, cold, pressure, exposure,
washing, melting, and grinding, and that suddenly now
on this unseasonally sunny late-October afternoon, had been plucked from its
voiceless destiny
to become a part of the intense fast-moving transparent flood of verbally architected
consciousness
that we call history in our dismayingly blinkered fashion;
and its character until that moment, which to it was to be an unthought piece of the
breathing universe,
nameless, abiding, ceaselessly changing, without significance,
turned in my hand, and without an instant’s delay, into an object of use and
comparison,
with a purpose not its own purpose, but to do with buggies and bicycles
that it had never in all its millions of years conceived, and that it was certainly
not equipped for understanding – and yet also, I thought,
warm like human skin, naked, and friendly, and intimate,
so that I wanted to say: O I’m sorry! (but at the same time, how nice to encounter
you!):
I hadn’t realised you were there.