Post Holes by Karl Kirchwey
Post Holes
I have been replacing fence posts this summer-
not, I think, out of any particular need
to enclose that which is mine (for indeed
my demesne in this world is quite minor),
nor because good fences make good neighbors (they do,
but my neighbor is more competent than I),
nor because the old ones are rotten, though they are, surely,
but because the earth feels more familiar the deeper I go,
in its crumbled alternating veins of warm and cool,
as if, beyond the instinctive dread of suffocation
and darkness, lay a return to something I had known,
a kind of tender vertigo, and I am unable
to decide whether or not I should resist.
These four-by-fours, of course, would make a fine martyrdom,
but I know that story, and it's different from
this feeling of recovering something lost:
a bit of faience ware, a buried silver spoon,
a rusted padlock or a toy paratrooper,
his arms folded patiently across his chest since the year
the boy lost him, playing, who has become a man.