Breaking Fences

First published in Grey Matter #1, 1987, page 16. Also published in Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society #6, October 1997, page 108.

There’s a poplar in the neighbour’s yard where

Robert lives

with a branch

that with a jump

you dangle from and pull

your legs up then

swing onto,

that beckons to branch after

branch till you can see

the drive-in.

Me and Robert climbed it

till it fell in the storm and

wrecked the fence we used to hop.