by Brett Rutherford
Town fathers, what have you done?
Last night I returned
(I vowed — I made the lake a promise)
intending to tramp the lane of maples,
read with my palms the weary tombstones,
feast with my eyes the clouded lake,
lean with a sigh on founder’s headstone,
chatter my verses to turtles and fish,
trace with my pen the day lily runes,
the wild grape alphabet,
the anagram of fallen branches,
all in a carpet of mottled leaves.
The mute trees were all assembled.
The stones — a little more helter-
skelter than before,
but more or less intact — still greeted me
as ever with their Braille assertions.
The lake, unbleached solemnity
of gray, tipped up
and out against its banks to meet me.
All should have been as I left it.
Heart sinks. The eye recoils.
My joy becomes an orphanage
at what I see:
from gate to bank to bend
of old peninsula,
across the lot
and back again,
sunk into earth
and seven feet high
A CHAIN LINK FENCE!
Town fathers, what have you done?
Surely the dead do not require protection?
Trees do not walk.
The birds are not endangered.
How have your grandsires sinned
to be enclosed in a prison yard?
As I walk in I shudder.
It is a trap now.
A cul-de-sac.
I think of concentration camps.
For years, art students painted here —
I hear the click of camera shutters,
the scratch of pens,
the smooth pastel caress,
taste the tongue lick of water color,
inhale the night musk of oil paints.
Poets and writers too,
leaning on death stones
took ease and inspiration here,
minds soaring to lake and sky.
At dawn, a solitary fisherman
could cast his line here.
Some nights the ground would undulate
with lovers
(what harm? who now would take
their joy between two fences?)
The fence is everywhere! No angled view
can exclude it. It checkerboards
the lake, the sky, the treeline.
They tell me that vandals rampaged here,
knocked over stones,
tossed markers
into the outraged waves.
Whose adolescents did this,
town fathers?
Yours.
Stunted by rock and stunned by drugs,
they came to topple a few old slabs,
struck them because they could not
strike you.
Let them summon their dusky Devil,
rock lyric and comic and paperback,
blue collar magic, dime store demons —
they wait and wait,
blood dripping from dead bird sacrifice
until the heavy truth engages them:
The dead are dead,
magic is empty ritual,
and stubborn Satan declines
to answer a teen age telegram.
Fence in your children, not our stones!
— October 25, 1989, Edinboro, Pennsylvania
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