The pasture sloping from our house we divide in two. The lower half we keep wild, mowing it once a year, in late autumn, before snow. We enjoy observing what emerges naturally from earth, the scrum of species, progression of colors, how creatures from the adjacent forest – deer, turkeys, songbirds, many others no doubt – organize their nests in the high protective grass.

The upper half of the pasture we keep as lawn, watered nightly by ingenious pop-up sprinklers, mowed weekly, to stroll on pleasantly or, if you’re a grandchild or dog, romp. It gleams green all summer, whatever the weather, blandishing us with a paradisial delusion hardly less charming for being false.

Dog-pal Henry’s too small to soldier into midsummer’s high grass, yet he nonetheless noisily objects to other creatures using the field to nest. The nerve! This is his dominion, his fierce yap from the deck insists; wait till autumn after the grass is sheered and he’ll show these interlopers who’s who – see if he doesn’t!

This recurrent comedy (comical to Henry’s housemates, though not to him) recalled to mind Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” which I hadn’t reread for at least a year. (For your convenience it’s appended below, though you may have it handy on a shelf.)

Frost is one of the few poets I must reread, though I can recite several of his shorter lyrics verbatim. For me he’s our most heartening poet, never prickly or difficult, blessed with a diction plain, placid, lucid, and profound. If it’s as if he’s at your fireside jawing, yet his meditations – for he’s a meditative soul, notwithstanding his worn jeans – delve deep, transforming homely existence into a mystery hauntingly complex. (I envy his timbre but can’t emulate it, too much in love with the Latinate.)

Frost may be our only author who can combine limpid verse, vivid storytelling, and an essayist’s meditation into a single work. (His poem “The Death of the Hired Man,” I rate our language’s finest short story.) We haven’t time now to marvel at his magic but reread “Mending Wall” – slowly – then again, and you’ll get a sense. Can’t you just feel those two tillers of earth flanking their disrupted wall, recalling the frosts and critters and discourteous hunters which dislodged those stones? Don’t you share the narrator’s frustration with his less literary neighbor, who keeps grunting an old bromide – “Good fences make good neighbors” – without musing why that should be so? Can’t you feel the poet’s grudging respect for this less than fascinating farmer, whose gruff wisdom grows from the soil?

Frost’s seemingly easy music taunts me. Be still, my heart! (Corelli’s Concerti Grossi exert a comparable hypnotic appeal.) How on earth! But what thrust this poem into my mind this morning were not literary, but moral concerns. More and more our nation’s chosen leader is dictating to foreign powers how to conduct their affairs, as if he were their overseer and they our slaves. The condescension, arrogance, obtuse indifference to other people’s variety and rights make me cringe, writhe – who the f*** does he think he is? And he is speaking for me! Howl! Yes, I yearn for the nations of earth to act in harmony; in theory, I want to level the walls that divide us; but that is not our nature. Humans, alone among creatures, demand respect, our protected space, where we can nourish our individuality, that uniquely human attribute. Boundaries honor; rightful walls mend those within and without.

My weepy apologies to all who share our planet. This is not who I am! But this is who we are.

*

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSomething there is that doesn’t love a wall,That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,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 repairWhere they have left not 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 lineAnd 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 ballsWe 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 out-door 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 acrossAnd 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 wonderIf I could put a notion in his head:‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t itWhere there are cows? But here there are no cows.Before I built a wall I’d ask to knowWhat I was walling in or walling out,And to whom I was like 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 ratherHe said it for himself. I see him thereBringing a stone grasped firmly by the topIn each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.He moves in darkness as it seems to me,Not of woods only and the shade of trees.He will not go behind his father’s saying,And he likes having thought of it so wellHe says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’