This time the frost recalls the real way
A wall works; Not to win a cold war
But to delineate the parameters
Of property and pasture
In fact, even the title of his folksy New England ode
Tells the real story
Not a structure to keep something
Out or in, but rather something to mend and heal
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
That sends the frozen groundswell
And spills the upper boulders in the sun
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast
The work of hunters is another thing
I have come after them and made repair
While they have not left one stone on a stone
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding
To please the yelping dogs
The gaps I mean
No one has seen them made or heard them made
But at Spring mending time, we find them there
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us
Once again, we keep the wall between us as we go
To each the boulders that have fallen to each
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game
One on a side, it comes to little more
There where it is, we do not need the wall
He is all pine and I am apple orchard
“My apple trees will never get across and eat
The cones under his pines”,
I tell him. He only says,
“Good fences make good neighbors”
Spring is the mischief in me
And I wonder if I could put a notion in his head
“Why do they make good neighbors?
Isn’t it where there are cows?
But here there are no cows
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was likely to give offense
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
That wants it down”
I could say “Elves” to him
But it’s not elves exactly
And I’d rather he said it for himself
I see him there bringing a stone grasped
Firmly by the top in each hand
Like an old stone savage, armed
He moves in darkness
As it seems to me not of woods only
And the shape of trees
He will not go behind his father’s saying
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says it again:
“Good fences make good neighbors.”
seedeenow 