Making Fence

tied to the house the way Grampa said, but a boat to take her away. In the fall, when the floods came, people said the rivers swelled so big that if you were crazy enough you could take a little fishing boat all the way to the Mississippi River, and from there, you could ride the rough water to the sea. She thought of the two ofthem together in the boat, Mamaw in the back, wrapped in aquilt, two long gray braids falling over her shoulders, looking like a picture of Pocohantas in Alice Ann's history book at school. Alice Ann would do all the rowing , and, who knows, they might end up on some island where it was summer all the time? Yet even as she saw the picture, Alice Ann felt her chest grow heavy with the impossibility of it. She knew she would leave as soon as possible, either when her father came back for her at the end of the summer, or later, on her own. But Mamaw would never come along. She took one ofMamaw's hands andput it under the blanket, to warm it. They both heard a sound and tensed, listening, but it was neither Grampa waking, nor a baby crying, but a semipassing on the highway that ran the ridgeline above them, its tires singing a little across the pavement, the way truck tires do. ^Di1><*¦ Making Fence "Make sure it's square with the world." His big paw clutched at the cedar post And I half-hidden, one eye squinting behind Another, my mind unsure of priceless longitude. All day long, the cocky diggers bit the hole, Their sharp lips gobbling up and spitting out Cold red clay. All day long, the ragged obelisks Penetrated the earth, posing for a time In awkward rebellion to our precious pattern. And we, content to be some kind of Prósperos, Ordered them into long, unbending rows. But I thought in nature's time They would weaken from our packed earth And rise triumphant in those broken lines Of victory. -Marshall Myers 56 ...