INSIDE THESE FENCES

Good fences,
a flinty New Englander
once wrote,
makes good neighbors.
And I've constructed
millions of them.
I've tried to keep out
the many bad
and dangerous sides
of my mind
that assault
from places known
and hidden;
that spreads its poisons
secretly
or trumpets its disdain;
the side that believes
that love is finite,
that kindness
is for faggots
or mothers,
that bleeding
reveals flags,
that color is destiny,
that poems are limp-wristed,
and that my heart is really really
pure
and beyond reproach.
But somehow the pebbles
or stones
or boulders
get moved
and all my time is spent
shoring up
a more porous
container.
It's taken me
almost a lifetime
to learn
a most basic truth:
we can never know
the other
unless
we allow them
to sit at our table
and discuss mysteries
both big
& small,
until the stones
are rubbed
smooth
of its
edges.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019