Free Verse
The fence was built after leaving
I buried you in August, though the ground was still frozen from a winter not yet come. The preacher had not arrived, and already he was closing his book. Dust rose like psalms from his sleeves. He said nothing of the storm that split the oak three years before you planted it or after. You were always ahead of your own shadow, calling my name before I knew it was mine. There is a field behind the house you remember it, though we never owned it where the fence leans like a tired confession. I built it the morning you left, hammering nails into boards uncut, each strike ringing from a church not yet raised. The cattle gathered anyway. They knew. Last night or next spring you stood at the porch edge in that blue dress you ruined in the river the day we first met after we said goodbye. You told me the river runs backward now, that fish leap into the hands of the dead, that names drift upstream to mouths that never held them right. I asked if you were cold. You said, only where you forgot me. The lantern flickere I had not yet lit it. There is a letter on the table, ink wet from a pen I lost as a boy. It tells me not to follow, though my boots are already heavy with the road to where you will be buried or were. The horse will not drink. He stares into the trough like it owes him a memory, like he recalls the day it dried before we dug it. They say the future comes plainly: a woman folding what was never washed, a man grieving what is not yet broken, a child calling for a mother who has not learned to leave. You are all of these. And I am still at the gate I have yet to open, watching you walk toward a horizon that arrives before you do. The sky split once or will light pouring through like mercy, everything briefly in its rightful place: you beside me, the field unbroken, the fence unbuilt, the earth soft enough to keep what we had not yet lost. Then gone. So I go on building a future from splinters, a prayer from echoes answering yesterday for what I will
By Taylor Ward7 months ago in Poets
