Creation by Howie Good

I hauled the stones in a wheelbarrow from the woods
behind our house, killer work for someone my age,
and dumped them in a growing jumble at the end of the garden,
and within a few days, and despite battered fingers,
I had gathered enough to build a winding two-foot-high wall,
lifting and heaving and wedging the stones into place,
misshapen pieces in a kind of extended jigsaw puzzle,
some stones as flat as dishes and others as fat as bricks,
but most as free-form as words before words form a poem.



Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.