Stonewall

by Richard Taylor

It was the low place that seemed unkind, the wall
foundered, the stones no longer snug
and holding for a partial mind at work.

The voids want fresh stones, and the mind knows
they rest abroad in another field. Once every summer
five torn loose and chewed by the glacier’s

dark tooth bark their single syllable hurt
at the mower’s blade. Otherwise the earth is coy
to a mind’s pry, but the bar muscles

into the hard thatched grass, by fists
of turf, teases a stone, each one all around,
intimate and slow, until they murmur

of primal rivers rounding, smoothing, and lever up
into the forgotten sun. They say their several weights,
their cousin shapes, accede to a mind in its gaps

that ache too much in a man alone with his only arms
before old Harald told me “Lay the barrow to a stone,
the stone rolls into the barrow’s hug, rights willingly

and wheels to the wall.” Now I’ll pillow them,
tuck them lovely and trigged, and true the partial mind
to a trim spine riding even on the meadow’s swell.