After a video installation by Jill Baker
A woman has gathered a pile of small rocks and she is trying
to puzzle them back together to their original stone.
She finds edges that show an affinity for each other,
positions rock against rock in her fingers, searches for their siblings
to fill negative spaces. Dust sifts onto her palms. Her work is impossible.
She cannot reassemble with the sheer power of wishing,
the sheer coaxing of soft hands that haven’t been on earth
a fraction of the millennia those rocks have. But still she tries.
A palm full of shards, an imagination full of a perfect stone orb
that is impossibly heavy, heavenly smooth, almost living, containing
every one of its possible children. The sum of its parts:
the hand containing every fragment it will ever hold. The sum
of its parts: the eye containing every tear it will ever shed.
The sum of its parts: the body containing every possible life.