By Joseph Nardoni

Whose woods these were
I used to know, trees standing 
naked in the snow slanting
towards the lacy, ice-boned lake—
he used to live in the village below,
behind fine pickets that sifted 
snow and hardwood clapboards
with cut-out window double gaslight glow,
cousin of Curmudgeon I’d meet
to mend dumb walls with every spring.

And perhaps it’s true to say 
I knew the man in town and liked
him better than his distant brother
in those summer months
when the woods hung dark
green shade along my windings
there, where I’d see him of a morning
sweating round a hummock in humid
air, placing stones with such great care,
I’d nod and pass him by—I had no shovel.

Once a year I come here now,
while engine coughs and idles
where my horse had jangled sleigh bells
standing in the snow.  I wait a while
in winter sun’s waning grip,
trees blurring wetly in random flakes, 
joints aching like alarm clocks,
smelling elbow liniment as moonrise 
casts blue mysteries over all the humps
that lay beneath the snow before the barren trunks.

Damned memory that draws me back
like a moth to brightly mordant grief!
A woman in a red-hood cloak, waving
dimpled at my gate, passing by along
the path to a man with a darker leaf,
who even now, in blizzard justice
still lives so far behind a fence
of gray concrete and razor wire

there’s no reason to inquire
of his health.  And I, having
let her take that other path
tore my thin wise skin in wisdom’s aged warning,
a red cloak twisted in a tree branch
above a new-turned hummock.
Sometimes it scrapes your heart
to know your neighbor’s part in life:
it’s then good fences make good neighbors.

I won’t sleep tonight.