On the Fence on a Maine Friday Morning

So already, I'm sitting again in the Orono Public Library, this time on the temporal fence that separates the last day of my three-day Maine writing retreat from the first day of my Massachusetts regular life resumed. Whether or not it should, my mind routinely prepares for what's next, even when it desperately wants to be fully engaged in what's now.

That's why before coming to the library today, I gassed up my car for tomorrow's ride home--and photographed the Stillwater River, which divides Orono into two parts. Rivers, like fences, divide. River water, like time, flows--but sometimes, like time, seems to stand still.

I know that if I lean too far toward tomorrow, I risk squandering today. But if I don't acknowledge the fence, I may miss the chance to make it something other than a divider between a life shaped by others' needs and desires and one shaped by my own. Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1820. It may be that integration and division don't need to be antithetical. The challenge is, after all, to feel creative and free even when I'm in Massachusetts being responsible. Maybe I don't need to "resume" my regular life, as I put it in the first sentence of this blog, exactly. Maybe I can live it in a modified but still responsible way. And actually write something now and again.

Of late, I've been thinking a lot about fences. How could I not be, given that Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard contains multiple pieces that focus on the fence on which Matthew Shepard was left to die--and even allows it to speak as an "objective witness" of the oratorio's events?*

Actually, it was Leslea Newman in her October Mourning poetry cycle who first gave voice to that iconic fence so often rendered artistically in publicity for performances of the oratorio. 

Yes, there's "objective witness" courtesy of that fence in the oratorio. But in my opinion, there's important emotion, too. Take, for example, "The Fence (one week later)"--meaning one week after the murder. (I hope you'll listen to it at minute 57:30 in this Interlochen Festival Choir performance.) The text of the poem* is preceded by the following epigraph: "'I have seen people come out here with a pocketknife and take a piece of the fence, like a relic, like an icon.' ̶ Rev. Stephen M. Johnson, Unitarian minister."

I keep still

I stand firm

I hold my ground

while they lay down

flowers and photos

prayers and poems

crystals and candles

sticks and stones

they come in herds

they stand and stare

they sit and sigh

they crouch and cry

some of them touch me

in unexpected ways

without asking permission

and then move on

but I don't mind

being a shrine

is better than being

the scene of the crime 

The first part of the poem definitely offers factual witness: the still fence lists curious human behaviors and artifacts associated with them, neither of which it has been used to seeing or experiencing. The transition to the realm of feeling is accomplished by the ambiguous word "touch": we're asked to wonder if the fence feels physically touched, emotionally moved, or both. An assertion of the fence's integrity follows: those who touch it "in unexpected ways" do so "without asking permission"--in other words, without respecting the fence as a sentient player in the drama. Finally, after a somewhat offhand "I don't mind," the fence expresses a preference for being a place of memorial rather than murder. Such a preference must have some basis in feeling.

There's something about the voice of this fence that I love. It conveys a baffled humility and an acceptance in response to human behaviors that are new and not fully comprehensible to it. I think I sometimes hear myself speaking to myself in that voice a few days after my mother has exhibited a new Alzheimer's-related behavior. The shock and sadness of first observing the behavior dissipates over several days, and is followed by a sad but willing acceptance of the new reality. At that moment of acceptance, I can honestly say to myself, "I don't mind; this is where we are now, and it's not the worst place we could be." Sometimes I surprise myself by managing to climb over a fence into a place that I never imagined setting foot in, let alone coming to inhabit.

So no, I'm not going to carve a chunk out of the wooden table where I'm sitting in the Orono Public Library and take it home with me: somebody else is going to need to sit here tomorrow to do what they must do. But I am bringing home the three blog posts I've written while I've been up here in Maine. The words, like that river water, may not look like they're flowing, but they are. I'd better give them a place to gather and speak. There may well be a good road home, but it's going to have to run through places on both sides of the fence.

* Johnson explained this in an interview with Colorado Public Radio.

** The entire libretto of Considering Matthew Shepard can be found here: https://conspirare.org/wp-content/uploads/CMS-Libretto-LA-June-2018.pdf