A poem

I finally got to the April 28th New Yorker after losing it twice (I ended up borrowing a copy). I am glad I got it for a lot of reasons, but I especially liked this poem.

Here Name Your

My friend spends all summer
mending fence for the elk to blunder

back down and the cows to drag
the wires and the snow to sit and sag

on, so all the twist and hammer and tauten
and prop amounts at last to nought, knot, tangle.

The next year he picks
up his pliers and fixes

the odds all over again. There are no
grownups, and I think that all of us children know

and play some variation on this theme, the game of all join
hands so that someone can run them open.

Then war whoops, shrieks, and laughter
and regather together

as if any arms might ever really hold.
I'm trying to finger the source -- pleasure of or need

for -- these enactments of resistance, if Resistance
is indeed their name. I'm trying to walk the parallels to terminus --

call them lickety-split over rickety bridge,
tightrope, railroad tie, or plank as you see fit --

trying to admit to seeing double,
innumerable,

to finding myself beset by myself
on all sides, my heart forced by itself

for itself, to learn not only mine
but all the lines --

crow's flight, crow's-feet, enemy, party, picket,
throwaway, high tide, and horizon -- to wait

in the shadows of scrim each night
and whisper the scene. Always, some part

of the heart must root for the pliers, some
part for the snow's steep slope.

--Dora Malech

It's one of those poems where I feel like the tricks are obvious ("nought, knot" for example, or "lickety-split over rickety bridge") and yet I don't think I ever would have thought to do it myself. Well, most poems are like that, but this one's charms are sort of obvious and sort of obscured by the obvious ones, if that makes any sense.