Poems by Dennis Camire

From the Long Poem, “When One Has Walled a Long Time All Alone”

Inspired by Galway Kinnell and the dry stone waller, Dan Snow

by Dennis Camire

From Canary Summer 2021

Dennis lives on Pinnacle Mountain where the Oxford foothills meet western Maine's northern Appalachian mountain range. He hikes and canoes often in the Androscoggin watershed.

When one has walled a long time all alone
One notes earthworms rising nights to excrete
their castings which, over centuries, will bury the
seemingly indomitable wall so--though surviving the
skidder and property disputes—the wall cannot escape
the laws of mother nature; and so one sees the wall, so
far down the road, as a mansion for the million-plus earth-
worms working each acre below; and one feels, in their boot
sole sinking into mud from last night’s downpour, the gravity
of one’s own mortality though, with the thought of the worm’s
three hearts fueling the half-inch of topsoil they create each
year (all the while playing David to the Goliath of stone),
one grows to accept the decline one feels in laying all
the granite capstone; and one desires, even more,
that green, home burial in pine coffin where the
decaying walls draw so many worms to de-
compose my stone bones back into dirt and
the god-stuff of duff for lovely earthworms
when one has walled a long time all alone.