stone wind gray

It doesn’t bother me that the word “stone” appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that “wind” and “gray” appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable.

—Richard Hugo, title essay of The Triggering Town (Norton, 1979)

locked within

Michelangelo always tried to conceive the figure as lying hidden in the block of marble on which he was working. The task he set himself as a sculptor was merely to remove the stone which covered them.

—E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1950