Stone on stone I reassemble an old
wall that runs through a pine forest.
The work is hard. I am exuberant,
lifting and grunting at the edge
of my strength. Bloody knuckles,
sore back, dirt covered, I stink of
mold and effort. Crows for company,
they dance and elevate and offer their
opinions of my skill, as I hoist yet
another ragged stone in place. The
forest floor is laced with sunlight.
My young daughter, wise with delight,
watches as a crow. Too small to lift
such stones, she flits off to build
fairy houses against the trunks of
trees, twigs and bark and moss
assembled and left in peace. We
each are builders in our forest
home. I admire her efforts more
than my own, her imaginings
more lasting than stone on stone.
Stone on stone our wall marks
nothing but itself and abandoned
farms and forgotten oxen-powered
skidders piled with stones and dead
farmers who edged their fields in
stones, which grew like crops out
of the cleared soil. Oh, they hated
that work, hard and loathsome. I
find empty bottles corked and intact,
secreted in the wall’s keep, in which,
young crow claims, forest fairies sleep.
I am a druid of sorts, wary of faith’s
certainty, of my human kind who refuse
the muck and slime and bubbling
effervescence of a vernal pool, who
cannot speak to stones, the hard
kiss on their fingers—a yelp, a cuss—
as all walls require. My daughter is
wiser than I. The wisdom of crows
shines in her eyes. She knows a wall by
its purpose is known as she hops along
my new-built wall stone-by-stone.
—
Anthropologist David Jenkins is the author of Nature and Bureaucracy: The Wildness of Managed Landscapes (2022). He has taught at MIT and Bates College and worked in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. For the last dozen years, he has worked in public lands management, where he tries to do some good for the planet. His essays and poems appear in Sky Island Journal, High Country News, The AutoEthnographer, and elsewhere.
