Grapevine Twist

// DJ Moser

In the summer of nineteen ninety-one
with another sixteen-foot plank across
my shoulders having sweated out six pounds
already that day toting a nail gun
at my hip that breathed just like Darth Vader
before it shot a nail through the wet oak
and into the poisoned fir posts packed in
red Virginia clay every eight feet for
more than a mile to fence in horses that
would someday be boarded in the barn where
I slept in a tent in the loft climbing
up at night alone to hear the raindrops
on the metal roof that Hobart from down
the way who would later die of cancer
had helped me nail down while his dog lay in
the shade of his truck snapping at horse flies
Hobart who told me we were going to
put a grapevine twist on that corral fence
with a length of string and a dozen nails
proving the eye more deft than the transit
Hobart who could foretell the weather to
the minute as I held that plank in place
with my hip and fired three nails into it
to the post little knowing that sixteen
years later I would sit on the top rail
of that fence with Hobart in the ground less
than a mile down the road and I would watch
the weather blow in across the hollow