And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.—Walt Whitman

Upturning logs I looked for bugs
and watched ants bore subway routes
through wood and pink worm-trains swelling
into the black cake of the soil
where grubs finger fossils folded
in Earth’s flesh and mites small as specks
of frost and farther into utter blindness
under a molten core deeper
than oceans where I imagine
translucent men dwell oblivious
to lava or space monsters hide
after tunneling to darkness
but all of it is unknown
and of it is a mystery,
a word cognate with mystical
so I think of Greek religion
and the Eleusinian Mysteries
of Athens where people wandered
to the cave where Hades kidnapped
the maiden Persephone down to hell
and that cavern might lead to hell
or heaven or purgatory
and I took a nap and dreamed seashells
rimmed on white shorelines with cockles
and arks and shark eyes and conches
while auger snails spike nacreous towers
pallid under the waves scrolling
onto quintillions of sandgrains
though astronomers say there are
more suns in the whole universe
than all sandgrains on every beach
on Earth as they boil and float
mothered by blue galactic arms
dancing with ponderous vastness
popcorned with super novae
and black holes and each mouse and stone
is a fathomless mystery.

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Eric Fisher Stone is from Fort Worth, Texas and is currently a graduate student at Iowa State University in its MFA in creative writing and environment program. His poems have appeared in “Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review,” “Third Wednesday,” “The Lyric,” “Yellow Chair Review,” “Jersey Devil Press,” “Turtle Island Quarterly,” “Uppagus,” among several others.

Photo Credit: Andrew Kehoe, Retrograde Collective