Sunday, March 28, 2010

Welcoming Hands- A Stone's View.



The Dry Stone Waller Revisits Spring's Surfacing Fieldstones




Before stones of eggs hatch feathered heads

or tadpoles eel from gel-a-ti-nous embryos,

fieldstones crown the brown, thawing ground

and, after decades of mid-wifing stones,

I'm so smitten with my youthful marvel exhumed

in desiring, like a child around puppies,

to lift each newborn up, turn them over,

and run hands over wet heads and torsos,

that, over supper, my wife spies the young buck

who, long ago, abruptly frostheaved her life

and, that evening, she loves me so much

that, as I thust up and up and up in lust,

I'm like a rising stone given a second life,

and I welcome hands gripping my schist hips

before feet scamper the granite shoulders

and, when it's over, one warm fingertip

alights the forehead's cliff, slides down the

face-wall of the jowels, and, like the lost hiker

in the White Mountains, seems to know home

is somewhere close, now that she stares into

that familiar old-man-on-the-mountain nose.


A poem, by Dennis Camire, whose chapbook of poems about Dry Stone Walls (being published by Fishing Line Press) will be coming out shortly.