Fences

A fence runs between
the houses whose rooms

are stacked with boxes of things
collected from the decade,
the clutter of years when

love was love and duty
was a man in a tank watching
Aral mountain ranges on the

other side of a Cold War border,
hands ready for the pistol
and radio at his reach

lest any hoards tried
to dilute the United States of America
in storage, I slept
like a bone in an airless vault.

But everything
was turned inside out
by the time I woke up,

the fence remains but everything
I live next to is three stories high,
even TV antennas snatching images

from the sky are gone from my view,
chimneys are rare as honesty at retirement parties,

satellite dishes sneak the world to
my house of boxes.

And love became duty
to remain on the border
of the bed my limbs stayed in,
too late realizing that

the line of death was
my breath heavy with scotch and mouthwash
and pithy perfumes for the tongue
when all my speech became poetry
about duty and honor while she nodded
and brushed her daughters' hair,
she takes a loose strand
from her shoulder, she examines the end,

the hair is split,
voiceless, she speaks

This where it ends,
I cannot breath,

there are fences running l over the world
going somewhere but we do
is put the past away
in boxes until the corners of rooms
crowd me and speaks to me
n loops of your language
that's liquid and lost in attention to
details that are about why
you become invisible
even in bed,
a mining camp
than the place where
dreams slip across the darkness
when we've stopped talking,
when eyes are closed,
when breathing should be the set of dance step.,
not a race to the sunrise.

Everything is inside out
and I'm stupid enough
to believe that a man in the tank
loves the world even as bombs go off
around the limits of our fences,

But now I love a room
with high ceilings,
empty corners,
rooms big to swing
a cat by the tail,
where my voice rises high
and loud and rings against
the pipes and then dies
away like notes plunked
from a fine-tuned piano,

I love the discovery shoes,
sober talk, doors without locks,
windows left open

with every racket of car alarm
and leaf blower
and weekend carpenter

speaking to me in sounds
that bustle in phonics flashing bright words
that bluster like billboard lights ,


back yards yield to one another
like lovers wearing blindfolds in empty parks
horrified that they might
be passing each other as

both their reaches miss their
objects of desire
and both of them walk sightless
in the other direction,
around corners
and into office buildings
before one, and then the other

takes off the blindfolds
to discover that they are
in a different city
than where they started the day,
every one is in another part of
the map, fenced in with invisible armies
with flags we’ve never seen,
the world might learn to do something
with fences that run through the living rooms
so that the couches and beds have
politics in every position you assume
running from stress,

unwind the string
and kiss me, please,
you are a moon I want to have orbit me,
I am a gravity you cannot deny,
you make my fences sway in
your bluster and flower print dresses,
I regret fences I set up the day
you left town,

the last thing to be seen
were you on the other side of the fence
getting into your red Volvo
just before you drove away
with my heart in your trunk.