Is this us? Are we a seeming-woman dead under what should have been peaceful? A few splashes of beauty left with one shoe falling off?
Still, there are those who have been.
The final piece: a serpentine stone wall running through hills and trees and possibly dales, gratuitously windy and suspiciously neat.
The walls that sturdy New England farmers built in the days of wagons and Transcendentalists were never so graceful, with stones perfectly plumb and only the odd irregular rock lumping out to give a semblance of spontaneity.
Those old walls were made to make good neighbors and keep cows where they jolly well should be.
But, as the poet once said, here, there are no cows.
This wall has no great lumbering beasts to tame, no plodding bovines whose no doubt rich inner lives compel them to wander where they should not go.
There are only the cows of the soul, as it were– docile creatures who go where they go out of habit and need.
But still, there are those who have been misguided. Or perhaps they have accidentally left the guide behind altogether.
What about the cows who play with beach balls in youtube videos and snuggle up with sleepy farm boys when they are feeling low? What about the cows who have figured out how to open farm doors and steal floral sunhats on hot days?
Do walls help these cows?
Do the stacked stones of habit and routine and feeding times and milking times provide safety and structure and springboards for the wild cow? Or do walls mean that there is no such thing as wild?
Still, there.
HVWP COMMONPLACE 42
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