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The Diamond of Devotion A GUIDE TO GODLINESS Transparent river pebble greasy in a boy's fist before it's tossed, a toy, to his younger sister; adamantine luster spied by a local official who sold it for pittance to a peddler who first scratched his name with it in the councillor's window, then mailed the stone to the government mineralogist who cabled back every jeweler's file he owned had blunted; crystalline carbon shipped to the colonial governor who from state coffers paid the peddler mere hundredfold and at the Paris Exhibition had its fraction of an ounce venerated, relic of riches in the now's hereafter: so gives out the vein now legend, but let the stone sell again at the hands of thief and smuggler, the cutter of brilliants and the back­street one who recuts them into anonymity, the broker god whose distant eye behind its loupe magnifies the hardest of perfections, to buy for the beloved proof of her worth, soliciting for the lover the answer he desires. T H E S C H O O L E O F S K I L L the hardness test of Friedrich Mohs ./liter the talc the scrubbed miner dusts over himself, the green­to­gray of the dead, each Saturday, but before the calcite clotting the hearts of each knight and lady undusted in marble effigy, comes fingernail scratching in their names an empire from the mineral world, demanding that any hardness softer than copper penny give. Ever mistaken for other in the titled crystal family, often­flawed apatite follows, minor intrusion into the igneous and the hydrothermal vein, Greek for trickery, fraud, deceit; any gentleman's penknife would score hatchmarks down its pallid or ruddy prisms with the blade that can't incise into a window any more than reflection, gone, of a duel's scar. Joints and the faults in bedding planes lay waste the mine's spoil tip, kin torn from kin by the steel file tearing lustrous flakes of feld­ from ­spar. Let the rasp roughen a perfect cleavage but leave unmarred the plane of weakness that marries twinned quartz, one white mirror to another. Swilling ever finer grit, still no lapidary's servant, the tumbler, rumbling eight weeks [3.94.77.30] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:32 GMT) over its semiprecious load, can match oceans charged to abrade the facets, the fractures of the crystalline state, polishing sand grain against grain till smoothed. Most abundant after oxygen, one quarter of the colonized, cut­open earth's crust, able in number to segregate a beach, rated 7 whether amethyst, agate, or arrowhead's flint, starstone streaks a moonstone's half­caste, but bloodstone gives ground to the tyranny of topaz, quartz capitulates as, next, topaz itself does, drowned under the dust of sapphire's ungiving grind. What volumes are cut loose, face by face, to release a jewel's ire, what friction left to buff the colorless diamond into the dearest of love tokens except itself— A SWARME OF BEES Into exile each queen must carry her own gold, the way a worker bee, burdened by pollen grains bundled to her hind feet, drags the retreat perfumed from flowered bed to hive. Better a hem weighted lightly with diamonds in the one coat allowed, better than coin in my likeness, trading for bread. Another chapter from The Bluebird of Happiness left by someone in flight before me fed to the fire, and the wall dripped honey in beads lost from a dress I wore once. No retainer left to do for me, I scraped away the sticky sweetness, letting it cement the heavy coronation ring back on my thinner finger. Back of the wall the mob of worker bees secreted waxen cells that waited to be filled with food or young, the uproar deadened through generations of wallpaper into a genteel companion for roses' faded riot. Besieged by no more than glacier's long march, whitewashed hives buried themselves beneath the warm blankness of snow. In the half­sleep of half their lives, her female escorts woke enough to warm the queen [3.94.77.30] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:32 GMT) by surrounding her. Stingless drones she'd mate with, come the thaw, drowsed on, even the one who, accident of genes, would father a new slim virgin queen who'd wrest the hive from her by right. Before the danced­out language of the bees...

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