Alan Birkelbach: New and Selected Poems

Fence Duty on the Lazy L

-25Fence Duty on the Lazy L When the land had been firm we had strung wire on those posts. Now, during the drought, our eyes could follow the lines of split soil. Odd, we would say, how the ground would separate in circles at first around the posts, like stacked rings, and then start fingering off, large running cracks, tiny earthquake faults. We would scour for rocks and jam them down the holes, make the posts upright, make the fence lie about its strength. Where there had been grass there was a memory, along with any moisture. An overflowing well was a dream. One man said even his wife’s lips were dry. My eyes opened more scratchy every day. All of our dogs would bark raspy. And every day that fence continued to fall, the ground continued to craze. The earth would swallow the rocks; we’d have to find more. Each day, driving up, we would see those fence posts tilting like falling flags, poles we had righted just yesterday. So we would walk out through the dust, again, pulling and jabbing and jamming, thinking that in the pattern of the tilting posts, in the writing of the mud hieroglyphs, there had to be a message if we could only read it, or had enough faith. -26Maybe if we could follow the perfect peeling track with our feet, or undo the correct twisted line with our eyes, then it might lead us to a bubbling well or the sky might reward us, yes. But it didn’t, and still we kept coming back, it was our job, and everyday was the tilt then the pull, and the rocks so hot we could barely hold them before we threw them into the maw of the earth. There was no answer in those baked pathways, no way out for our blind steaming faith. It was a knot we couldn’t untangle, a path without a clue, a dry labyrinth we couldn’t escape. ...