Stone Wall in Autumn

October. Lemony leaves in citrus sunlight. The stonewall. New England woods. The spirits of dead animals, of colonial homesteaders, of Native Americans long ago, hundreds of years, countless generations of white-tailed deer, black bear, moose, the smaller creatures of the forest floor and canopy, squirrels, fox, fisher, and the fluttering forest birds of ever more - pileated woodpeckers, red-breasted nuthatches, eastern kind birds, mallard ducks in the beaver pond. Small forest sounds, a branch snapping, a hickory nut falling to the dried leaf cover.

And through these woods, a century old stone wall in the slow process of being resurrected. Too bad the back and arms not strong enough to move the biggest stones; not enough time for the stone worker to ply his amateur stone wall builder's skills. The wall like a horizontal monolith, an arboreal spine, an eccentric artist's riff on impermanence, a stony declaration of Being.

There is no wall but wall.

The stones once scattered by glaciers now coalesced into geologic and geometric symmetry. These things take time. Forests have time. Poets and sculptors not so much.