by Cecil Morris
Seven-foot high redwood, board-on-board,
the usual gaps overlapped, every view blocked
by new wood gloriously bright in shades of red
and blond, the fine fur of splinters waiting
on ungloved hands, for skin as bare as the boards
and ready, the gentle open arcs of rings, giant
fingerprints fragmented, divided, and the knots,
the hundred dark eyes of nature still solid, tight,
the marks of limbs truncated and lost, not present.
It is a thing of beauty, lovely in its bones,
as yet unstained, unoiled, still mutely holding the thunk
of nails sunk, of slap and shuffle of board against board,
of deafening rip of toothy wheels, of distant breezes
on flat leaves. It is that sharp line in the fraction
that divides the tiny numerator, my small patch
of earth, from the nearly infinite denominator
of this spinning world. Each handsome plank is a sliver
planed from a great tree and standing guard now for me.
This runway for squirrels, unmarked perch for nervous birds
to assess the safety of my feeders, demarcation
between my neighbor's life and my own, this timber
marshalled and mastered by my hands, testimony
to the power of my hammer, to my manliness.
Lie in the grass and look up at this towering
barrier, my own great wall to hold back neighbor's eyes,
to keep the secrets of my weeds inside, unseen
and safe, the truth of my life for me and mine alone.
Cecil Morris is a retired high school English teacher, sometime photographer, and casual walker. His first collection of poems, At Work in the Garden of Possibilities, came out from Main Street Rag in 2025. He has poems in The 2River View, Common Ground Review, Rust + Moth, Talking River Review and elsewhere. He and his indulgent wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool Oregon coast and the hot Central Valley of California.
January House Literary Journal 
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