1
\nStone walls emerge from leafy ground
\nand show their bones. In September a leaf
\nfalls singly down, then a thousand leaves whirl
\nin frosty air. I am wild
\nwith joy of leaves falling, of stone walls
\nemerging, of return to the countryside
\nwhere I lay as a boy
\nin the valley of noon heat, in the village
\nof little sounds; where I floated
\nout of myself, into the world that lives in the air.<\/p>\n
In October the leaves turn
\non low hills in middle distance, like heather, like tweed,
\nlike tweed woven from heather and gorse,
\npurples, greens, reds, grays, oranges, weaving together
\nthis joyful fabric,
\nand I walk in the afternoon sun, kicking the leaves.<\/p>\n
In November the brightness washes from the hills
\nand I love the land most, leaves down, color drained out
\nin November rain,
\neverything gray and brown, against the dark evergreen,
\neverything rock and silver, lichen and moss on stone,
\nstrong bones of stone walls showing at last
\nin November cold,
\nmaking wavy rectangles on the unperishing hills.<\/p>\n
2
\nWesley Wells was my grandfather\u2019s name.
\nHe had high cheekbones, and laughed as he hoed,
\npracticing his stories.<\/p>\n
The first time I remember him, it was summer at twilight.
\nHe was weak from flu, and couldn\u2019t hike for his cows
\non Ragged Mountain; he carried the old chair with no back
\nthat he used for milking
\nto the hillside over the house and called up-mountain:
\n\u201cKe-bosh, ke-bosh, ke-bo-o-o-o-sh, ke-bosh…\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t* * *<\/p>\n
While he milked he told about drummers and base-ball,
\nhe recited Lyceum poems about drunk deacons,
\nor about Lawyer Green, whose skin was the color green,
\nridiculed as a schoolboy, who left town and returned triumphant…<\/p>\n
and riding home from the hayfields, he handed me the past:
\nhow he walked on a row of fenceposts
\nin the blizzard of eighty-eight; or sawed oblongs
\nof ice from Eagle Pond; or in summer
\ndrove the hayrack into shallow water, swelling wooden
\nwheels tight inside iron rims;<\/p>\n
or chatted and teased outside Amos Johnson\u2019s with Buffalo Billy
\nFiske who dressed like a cowboy….<\/p>\n
While I daydreamed my schoolyear life
\nat Spring Glen Grammar School, or Hamden High,
\nI longed to return to him, in his awkward coat and cap,
\nin his sweater with many holes.<\/p>\n
3
\nA century ago these hills were bare;
\nyou could see past Eagle Pond to sheep in the far pasture,
\nwalls crossing cleared land, keeping Keneston
\nlambs from Peasly potatoes.<\/p>\n
Today I walk in Fields grown over\u2014among
\nbare birches, oak saplings, enormous
\nsugar maples gone into themselves for winter\u2014
\nbeside granite that men stacked
\n\u201cfor twenty-five cents a rod, and forage
\nfor oxen,\u201d boulders sledded into place,
\nsmaller stone
\nfitted by clever hands to lock together, like the arched
\nramparts at Mycenae.<\/p>\n
I come to the foundations of an abandoned mill;
\nat the two sides of a trout stream, fieldstone walls emerging
\nuncut and unmortared
\nrear like a lion gate…
\n\t\t emptiness over
\nthe still-rushing waters.<\/p>\n
4
\nAllende\u2019s murderers follow Orlando Letelier
\nto Washington; they blow up his car by remote control.
\nHis scream is distant, like the grocer\u2019s scream
\nstabbed in the holdup….These howls\u2014
\nand Tsvetayeva\u2019s in Yelabuga,
\nwho hangs herself in her cottage\u2014
\n\t\t\t\t pulse, reverberate, and die
\nin the scrub pine that grows from granite ledges
\nvisible against snow at the top of Kearsarge,
\nbecause jamming plates drove
\nthe Appalachian range through the earth crust
\nbefore men and women, before squirrels, before spruce and daisies,
\nwhen only amoebas wept
\nto divide from themselves. Stone dwindled
\nunder millennial rain
\nlike snowbanks in March, and diminished under glaciers,
\nunder the eyes of mice and reindeer, under the eyes of foxes,
\nunder Siberian eyes
\ntracking bear ten thousand years ago
\non Kearsarge…
\n\t\tand the Shah of Iran\u2019s opponents
\nwake to discover nails
\ndriven through their kneecaps. When Pinochet frowns
\nin Chile, hearing these howls,
\nthe corners of his mouth twitch with an uncontrollable grin;
\nTiberius listening grins….<\/p>\n
\t\t\tEach morning we watch stone walls
\nemerge on Kearsarge and on Ragged Mountain;
\nI love these mountains which do not change.
\nThe screams persist. I continue my life.<\/p>\n
5
\nAt Thornley\u2019s Store,
\nthe dead mingle with the living; Benjamin Keneston hovers
\nwith Wesley among hardware; Kate looks over spools of thread
\nwith Nanny, and old shadows stand among dowels and raisins,
\nwoolen socks and axes. Now Ansel stops to buy salt
\nand tells Bob Thornley it got so cold he saw
\ntwo hounddogs put jumper cables on a jackrabbit.
\nSkiers stop for gas, summer people join us, hitchhikers,
\nroadworkers, machinists, farmers, saw-sharpeners;
\nour cries and hungers, stories and music reverberate
\non the hills and stone walls, on the Exxon sign and clapboard
\nof Thornley\u2019s Store.<\/p>\n
6
\nAt Church we eat squares of bread, we commune with mothers
\nand cousins, with mothering-fathering hills, with dead and living,
\nand go home in gray November, in Advent waiting,
\namong generations unborn
\nwho will look at the same hills, as the leaves fall and turn gray,
\nand watch stone walls ascending Ragged Mountain.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t* * *<\/p>\n
These walls are the bones of Presidents, men and women
\nwho were never born
\nand will never lead the Republic into the valley of cattle.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
When gangs fight with dogs for the moose\u2019s body,
\nand poems for Letelier are scattered like the molecules of his body,
\nand the books are burnt, and this room wet ashes, and language
\nburnt out, and the dead departed along with the living,
\nwavering stone lines
\nwill emerge from leaves in November, on mountains without names.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Pole beans raise their green flags in the summer garden.
\nI grow old, in the house I wanted to grow old in.
\nWhen I am sleepy at night, I daydream only
\nof waking the next morning\u2014to walk on the earth of the present
\npast noons of birch and sugarbush, past cellarholes,
\nmany miles to the village of nightfall.<\/p>\n
-Donald Hall<\/em><\/p>\n\n 1 Stone walls emerge from leafy ground and show their bones. In September a leaf falls singly down, then a thousand leaves whirl in frosty air. I am wild with joy of leaves falling, of stone walls emerging, of return to the countryside where I lay as a boy in the valley of noon heat, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2341,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3925"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3925"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4068,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3925\/revisions\/4068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}