THe wall my father built to muscle back
the brown flood waters of the creek still stands.
It leans away from the run and hugs the contour
of serpentine embankment, redeeming years of silt

by interlacing a thousand granite slabs
against the tide of spring and spill of storm.
He could not bear the thought of land
he'd paid for, picking up to run away downstream

ending in useless mingling with other men's dirt
deep at the foot of the continental shelf
ten miles beyond the Chattahoochee's mouth.
So, he built. Each day, though tired from climbing

poles in the Georgia sun for the Georgia Rail Road,
he slowly removed his cotton shirt and sank
to his knees in the creek, feeling for stones
with his bare toes, and prying them out of bed

with his five-foot iron bar. He heaved them up,
wet and substantial, on the opposite bank,
and judged them, then carried them, staggering
under the load, to their exact spot in the rising wall,

setting them down like Hammurabi's laws, never
to be revoked. The whole he stocked and faced
with wet cement his small son carried to him
shirtless and sweating also, in a pair of buckets

swung from a home-carved yoke. The wall done,
he capped it with a pointing trowel, and with
his finger wrote my name, Ricky, and the date,
1955, which you will find today if you scrape back

the moss. The house has had six owners since,
and of these not one, I suppose, has any thought
of who prevented their foundation washing out
with freely offered labor long ago: or perhaps

they have. There's something in a wall's
just being there that speaks of someone's having lived
and looked upon the land, giving thought to time
and change, and taking stone in hand.