A few days ago I cut through Seattle Center to get to a restaurant in Queen Anne. It was a pleasant afternoon on the former World's Fair grounds, with workers setting up tents for Bumbershoot and a few dozen people lounging on the grass, trying to soak up as much of the fading summer as possible. It was a nice preview of the Central Park-like atmosphere that the city hopes to someday create at the Center, pending the unlikely appearance of millions of dollars for improvements.

One such improvement seems to have come early. Directly across from the entrance to the Children's Museum – just off the main path, on the hill overlooking Fisher Pavilion -- is a small garden area that must have been installed very recently. (I could tell by the nice, clean concrete benches – they haven't yet been discolored by greasy food or profaned by Sharpies.) It's a fairly secluded spot (for Seattle Center, anyway), surrounded by freshly planted flowers, shaded by tall trees and anchored by a few polished, flat granite boulders – one of which stands monolithic on its end – covered with etched words.

I walked up to the stones, fully expecting to see a memorial or a list of donors, and was surprised to discover that the etched words are poetry. Sculptor John Hoge's "Poetry Stones" are chiseled with quotations from dozens of poets, from Langston Hughes to e.e. cummings to Shel Silverstein. The words form a sort of mosaic of ideas and imagery, and in considering the stones one is inclined to read several pieces at a time, jumping from one stanza to the next.

Some of the quotations stand in stark contrast. It's a long way down from Anne Sexton's "There is joy in all" to "the cave" where Margaret Atwood would have you descend "towards your deepest fear." Other fragments seem to embrace each other: On one stone, Li Bai describes the moon as "a mirror in heaven," while nearby, Billy Collins speaks his admiration of "the Chinese poets looking up at the Moon."

If the Poetry Stones are indeed a sign of the Seattle Center we're going to have in 10 years, the future of the space is more promising than I would previously have believed. I can easily imagine the spot around the stones filling up with Goths making fevered entries in their journals, young artists scribbling away at sketchbooks and elderly couples sitting in quiet contentment.

All it has to do is survive a lifetime of festival crowds, all armed with greasy French fries and Sharpies. When you visit the poetry stones this weekend during Bumbershoot, if you see anyone fixing to deface this idyllic spot, do me a favor and scare them off in the name of civic pride.

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company