After Snyder’s Axe Handles

by Julia Shipley of Craftsbury, VT

One afternoon the last week of May
Trying to envision a paddock for heifers,
A mile of fence wire around an acre:
I remember the Atwood’s empty pasture:
Tilted posts and rusty wire
And I fetch a bucket, hammer and chunk of wood.
The porcelain knob on the side of the post
Could convey an electric current.
Mrs. Atwood says go ahead, so I pry
The cold knob loose
With the block and hammer
Withdraw the nail
And drop it in the bucket and a line
Returns from Robert Frost
To chide me:
“Good fences make good neighbors,”
And I say to the poet’s remains
“Look, I’m recycling
The retired farmer’s insulator
To start another farm.”
And I hear another poet
It’s Hayden Carruth’s ‘The Cows at Night’
When he says, “…among farms
So quiet, and the roadside willows
Opening out where I saw the cows.
Always a shock to remember them there, those
Great breathings close in the dark…I did not
want to go…I stood by the fence…”
I first read that poem a mile from where
Hayden wrote it and those cows are in my bones.
And I see: Frost set a post
And Carruth set a post
And I will pound mine in
To continue the current of words through this diminishing country,
By lifting a rock, a hammer, a pen
To mend