Walk-through

Walk-through, early spring

                 “Feeling along the dark undersides

of stones”

                        After W.S. Merwin’s “Identidy”

Spring but only at the bottom

even of the least of these

mountains—the greening

breeze pushes invisibly

between walls and fallen stones of walls

the heave of winter's

one last shrug of the surveyed

line until the boundary

doesn’t matter anymore

until what was meant to be kept

in or kept out is gone

and the keeper is gone, the who

who consumed them but

before that a banked winter 
of bails of hay

against the shed for them.

            If you’ve lost your faith

in snow, it’s mid-April yet.

The cheek of the mountain

will meet you and raise you

so when you come back down

you’ll be naked and Prodigal,

the shit of pigs packed

in the thinning tread of your boots

though not pigs, instead

it’s what’s been decaying all along,

what fell against a edge

of those weather smooth fence

stones and shifted them, so the seal,

where four hands two hundred years

ago and all the hands from then

to now maintained in late spring,

is broken and shifted, have made

a small sill for the coming

of May, an altar flat enough

for a sill, dark enough for a hide-e-hole

for some new vermin, their eyes

and spine aimed and vibrating

right at you as you top the hill,

though how would you know,

how can you tell one fallen

rock from another especially

if it is mostly beneath a still

green pine pushed to break

in the last blizzard tipped

and leaning into that crucial

stone, both still cemented with snow

while the altitude presses its maw  

against your esophagus to make you cough

and you turn back down

without marking a thing out of place.