Fatal Quartz

Hand-held Time Travel

• 

  My favourite

  chunk of quartz

  is shaped like an insect,

  a strange, happy accident, eons in the making.

  I have lots of quartz because my life

  is usually overheated

  and quartz seems cool

  to the eyes,

  if not to the fingertips

• A sojourn in Wikipedia

  will tell you

  that Roman naturalist

  Pliny the Elder

  thought of quartz as “water ice”

  permanently frozen

  during the long chill of time

  “He supported this idea,”

  says Wikipedia

  “by saying that quartz is found

  near glaciers in the Alps,

  but not on volcanic mountains

  and that

  large quartz crystals

  were fashioned into spheres

  to cool the hands.”

• There is a pleasing geometric

• steadfastness to quartz.

  No matter how distorted and stressed

  a quartz crystal may have been

• in the furnace of time,

  its long prism faces always make

  a perfect 60 degree angle.

• 

• Quartz

  slows down my

  restlessness

Quartz, like other mineral shard

has its sinister side.

The collecting of mineral samples

is ocassionally (distressingly)

• seen as a sign

  of mental distress

  (perhaps one clings

  to the 60 degree angle

  as a kind of geometric

  stedfastness)

  I had a good friend

  at the CBC

  a long time ago

  who drove to Niagara

  Falls

  expressly to jump into the cataract

  and end it all

  and she did that too

  and left behind her

  in the motel room she had rented

  windowsills full of

  crystals

  Quartz, Amethyst, Agate, Onyx, Jasper,

  Tiger’s Eye,

  dusty when they found them