Calendar Years

I’m building a wall—9 ½’ 
long, 2’ wide, high as a five-gallon 
bucket; two tons or more of unshaped 
field stones, some bearing the lichen they grew 
where once they lay, minding no business. 
They dreamed whatever enchants 
stones to their place, until a dozer woke them, 
a truck moved them, they were palletized, 
sold, and delivered, and now 
they enter my dreams. 

The wall encloses and keeps out nothing, 
marks no boundary, adjoins no neighbor.
In a few days, when the last stone has been set, 
the calendar of the wall will start, ab 
muro condito, from the founding of the wall, 
a.m.c. By Year 2 I will have planted
native perennials around it and placed 
potted plants on top. I cannot foresee 
Year 3, nor Year X, when it will collapse, 
nor Year X ± Y when 
it will have passed from my view. 

****

In Year 1 of the Great Loneliness, after 
the separation, when I hid in shame 
from any who might have helped, not least 
God, I walked the neighborhood in circles 
saying, “I won’t forget how it feels. I will 
always remember the pain of loneliness.” 
The resolution gave me comfort. This 
continued to Year 10, when meeting Patti 
reset the calendar. Now it’s Year 
23 of the Reset, Year 21 
of my Business Debacle and the First 
Gray Hair, Year 40 of My Son, Year 
46 of my Father’s Suicide, 
Year 72 of My Arrival 
on this slowly decaying orbiter, 
and so on and so forth, 
neither ad infinitum
nor diminuendo. 

****

Eleven years since I returned to You, 
I’m building a wall of unhewn stone,
about ten years since unexpectedly 
You drew near, almost palpably, like the warmth
of the beloved’s body lying close but not
touching. Nine years since we entered,
Patti and I, a mirrored room and knelt at the altar. 

****

I’ve displaced wrigglers and the yellow-
and black millipedes, disrupted the nurseries
of ants and the hidey-holes of roly-polies,
but only temporarily. I built 
in the light rain, while toads hopped to escape 
my feet, and a tiny spider, pale 
as the flesh of a white peach, scurried 
to avoid my eye. I am not sorry:
I am making them a high rise.

I lift and turn each stone. Try to register 
sides and surfaces, the angles, the layering 
and colors, the variable thickness—
the randomness of the world that I presume 
to order, on a small scale, to stand up 
against gravity and time, temporarily,
till time and gravity take it down, unhouse
again pill-bug and spider, and return the stones
to their dreams. I remember the stone 
on which the body of the Lord was laid 
to be anointed; it bore the weight 
He had borne—a stress my wall could not 
withstand and I cannot imagine. 

J.S. Absher is a native of North Carolina; a member of the church most of his 70+ years, now an active one; published poet, would-be independent scholar; happily married with son and stepson.