What I’m walling in is the flowers.
What I’m walling out is the grass.
I know frost does not love my walls.
Each spring I am compelled
to plop tumbled rocks
upon rocks that haven’t tumbled.
It’s not hard.
In summer too the top rocks fall
when deer jump the paths
to eat the hosta, or when, I guess,
the world spins just a hair too fast.
I don’t know. The rain, perhaps. Rocks fall.
Rocks are put on rocks because
You need a line between the flowers
that draw you out of doors to care for them
and the grass
whose only good is the good of negative space
between the beds
like that space between Fred
and Ethel, Rob and
Laura. The frozen groundswell doesn’t care
one way or another for walls.
The dead mechanical earth,
water responding to temperature, I guess
the mindless plants don’t care either,
but that’s harder to be sure of, the grass
climbs the little wall,
like a company of thin green Romeos
ascending the balcony to the beds
of all those Juliets,
or it insinuates
itself between the spaces
pulling away from the blow
of the mower
like a thief
darting for cover.
The flowers seem to despise the wall.
They leap over it to their deaths
or throw their children down
to pop up in the grass
like immigrants:
If you can’t save us save our babies,
raised in the country of grass.
Maybe I don't love a wall.
Maybe I can't love without one.
