My foothold is tenoned and mortised in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
– Walt Whitman
The stone walls of Pennsylvania,
mossed grays veined with dim tinsel,
whip by the car window, rows of Wissahickon schist
skirt the fields, stop short
where roads cut in and start again,
these rocks recall Lincoln,
his last long train ride home, people packed
side by side to peer at the great emancipator
(at what remains), stone walls were once
the white picket fences of America,
only unlike wood and paint they outlast
their makers, stand long past the time when
they mark a landed man’s borders, stand
in stoic testament to all things that pass.