[stones stacked at the back]
stones stacked at the back
of the piece at the little rise
into the trees, honeylocusts with
...neoclassical? gothic? thorns
classical thorns
hired to stack these rocks I
shift and walk, shift and walk
and stack and spit, take a
break, sift, pick loose skin
from a callous of course
the grass infested no
amount of turkey no
bantam rooster can
solve so I stay mostly in the rocks
digging out a few, so many loose
bones yes but not novel the
shocks running through
I thought "count every rock" and
you know, "one, one, and so on"
so I took a picture of the sunset
the early sunset, the sun barely
even setting, like the sun resting
with its eyes closed, beaming
through the seed heads of
middle distance and thought
of a fish I could catch, fishguts
in the garden, thought about the
hard rain forecasted and how
this hard ground, mostly dust,
bones, rock, and weeds would
feed the fish, would rush would
illuminate the ditch the valley and
how in town down the hill from
the house a pool would start at
the culvert and creep past the poles of
the martin houses over the tops of
green onions and halfway up the terrace to
the patio, pool
the brick fireplace its blackened grate
a landing for helicopters
from the book STOCK POND/ Bench Editions
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This poem illustrates some tensions of necropastoral poetics. The speaker is in the country, the speaker imagines the country, the speaker imagines town. Agricultural labor – picking rocks in a landscape of ticks – leads to material considerations: where the water pools, what’s in it, what it creeps up to.

Justin Cox on "[stones stacked at the back]"
"Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s National Poet, Discovered the Price of Fame"

"The title of this review is a quote recorded by Heaney’s sometime poetry editor and now letter chronicler Christopher Reid, whose notes on the letters of 1996 state that this was what 'Marie Heaney is reported to have said, and SH himself had to come to terms with its consequences for him, both in the wider world and closer to home.' The conflict between fame and private life, the tension between the preservation of the inner life that emits the poetry and the public life that elicits the reading and buying of that poetry, the ripples from the outside that touch the inner person and ripples of the inner person that affect everyone around him, all these are the themes of the book."

via PLOUGH
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What Sparks Poetry:
Kristin Dykstra on Other Arts 

"Dissonance dwells around a dirt road. Dirt roads appear stable, but with time you perceive that they exist in flux. Dissonance became a book of time. Time turns various and nervy–a click marking a photographic moment, a slow burn of interior pain. Photographs interrupt time, invite you into its astonishment. They propose other dimensions, reminding us that even our thoughts enter the past as they travel through the mind." 
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