Stones are the First to Rise

In Stones Are the First to Rise, Buddha, a U.P.S. driver, and an old woman living in hill country shares space and time with stones and peas and war and climate change, plus explorations of childhood and becoming a particular person. Throughout many of his books, Giannini finds himself working with discrete sets of concerns over the course of months or years, concerns that nevertheless cohere as a single envisioning, a book, as the parts of the body cohere to make body. Antonio Porchia's well-known words are appropriate here: "I know what I have given you. I don't know what you have received." The book is now in your hands. SAMPLE POEM: Stones Are the First to Rise The stones talk to each other, just as we do. . . . - Katsumahtauta (U.S. West Coast tribal elder) to anthropologist-linguist Jaime de Angulo 1. Rain pushing the night down through melting snow, entering earth and we felt safe enough after the storm. We stayed in the ground. Night could then be turned over in the morning. . .the dark clods and puddles with clouds we didn't crush. Night was coming up through the soil and vanishing. Among our kind, that same small stone turning up, as it did every year, always rising before us, blind eye in the night of dirt. Filthy with what it couldn't see, as a child without a mirror can't see its smeared face. Nothing Romantic or playful. Nothing green. Ancient. It seemed without knowledge of what or why it was, surfacing wet and splotchy, a single syllable: stone. 2. -in late spring A man began telling the crushed stones in the truck-bed each had the right to remain silent. Not one listened. Then they were lifted higher and higher, dumped loudly into their gray language, their heaped syntax (no one could decipher) on the ground. 'One rake deserves another, ' said a worker, as she and co-worker began spreading sentences of granite until the whole story became clear: the fresh path we could walk listening to the small nouns, the ancient ones, turning under our feet, how they depend, as we all do, on boundaries, boulders at the edge.