Gary Metras.

Gary Metras is the author of fifteen poetry chapbooks and books, most recently, Two Bloods: Fly Fishing Poems (winner of the Split Oak Press Chapbook Award 2010), with a new book, Captive in the Here, due in 2012 from Cervena Barva Press.  His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Poetry East, Blueline, Yankee Magazine, New England Watershed, English Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Small Press Review, Wild Earth, and Gray’s Sporting Journal. He is the editor and letterpress printer of Adastra Press in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

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GOSHEN STONE

With the last tap, tap of the hammer’s

wooden handle on the corner of the capstone,

the mason steps back, runs his eyes along

the line, then up and down the wall.

He winds the string back onto the broken foot

of ruler, retrieves hammer, chisel, trowel,

slides them into their places in the tool box

built long ago, stretches his spine so far back

he sees only treetops, then sky as blue as his

baby’s eyes. He slaps his thighs, dust puffs

the air. Toolbox in one hand, the other

balancing a four foot level on the shoulder,

he walks to the old Ford, loads it, and heads

to the bar before home. When he thought his son

was old enough, he drove to this house,

though out of the way of any errand, slowed,

stopped, and said, “That wall is still level, solid.

Those steps, thick slabs of Goshen Stone laid atop

mortared brick, sixty feet from street to door

at forty degree incline. These old bones remember

every job.” Once the son drove by that house

with his own son in the front seat, ice cream

beginning to drip from the cone in the boy’s hand.

He stopped and said, “See that stone wall

and those stone steps? Your grandfather built

them long ago and they still look good, solid.”

– Gary Metras

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