History of Barbed Wire

Stockman's ribbon wire, two strands with a third wire twisted inand sheared, began the Devil's fence in 1863, when Michael Kelly

first made it, to keep his wife's garden from cattle and vermin,a couplet of wires then patented by Joseph Glidden,

DeKalb, Illinois,1874, the twisted wire began the divisionof land, and the end of common-use and free movement

across the Great Plains of the last of the First Peoples. After the Civil War,it came into use ending the primacy of cavalry that began with Darius,

and ended with the Russian–Japanese war, in 1902, the Britishin South Africa used it to enclose their settlements against the Boers,

who were sent when captured to the first concentration campsand by that time the Great Divide had been squared off, the ghosts had begun

to move into the high mountains and take up with blizzards and the migrationof wolves into thin air, as it began to twist around each poled heart,

pulled tight by our pickups, winched taut as horse-words disappeared,the air bled its white emptiness that would be the limits of language

as providence would have it, the wire designed to cut, as the variationof patent #367, #398 of August 2, 1887, by Chester A. Hodge

of Beloit, Wisconsin, where a ten-point sheet metal spur rowel barbis inserted between large and small strands of wire, a sawmill blade,

a barbed galaxy or hurricane cutting up the Gulf, that will snag the bodiesafter the storm surge retreats, the car lots and warehouses empty,

battered and scraps of lives to catch on, hung up, strandedin free fire lanes, no-man's land, the DMZ, the wall, the wall

through Jerusalem, the fence to keep migrations of pumaand coyote and humans from moving fire-eyed in the night scopes,

the divisions of the heart—corazón, corazón, los vocesde muerte sonaron—in the dark, wires stretch beyond touch

in light, double-helices straight into vanishing points,mountains smeared titanium white, division upon division,

heart from body, souls from stars lifting themselves into day,into invisibility; cinched fencing to keep us from each

and each as though caged beasts, or one the beast, the other ourselves,and remember, we'll throw you against the fences like meat,

red and raw as the hands that wrapped youin the wire strands, the October wind in Laramie

coming down swift as hate, a pistol-whipped wind that fracturesthe skull, snapping the brain stem, your tears as soft as all the stars

that stretch across the abandoning sky, the rancher thought youa scarecrow at first stretched and hung in the morning.