One day too many, I sat astride
The seesaw in my childhood yard,
The weeping willow in the back
Now long having fallen to the axe.
So still I sat in the still of night,
Much older, too old to be a child,
And I thought of twenty years before
When the dripping days held more in store
And the fence that framed the savage lawn
Seemed higher than it does today;
Still, it was less genuine a barrier
Than it seems as I sit here now.
— Gabriel Fenteany, December 5, 1995 & February 6, 2014
