TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

You might be familiar with the famous poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost. The poem describes how the speaker and a neighbor meet to rebuild a stone wall between their properties every spring, after winter has done its damage. It begins with these four lines:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

And the poem ends:

I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Like one of Frost’s other poems, “The Road Not Taken,” the last bit of “Mending Wall” — “Good fences make good neighbors” — is often quoted and interpreted in various ways. That dialogue is sometimes used to defend the importance of boundaries, not just the literal fences and walls around private property but the boundaries we draw around ourselves as people.

Fences and walls are human-made structures, and they are inevitably eroded by the landscape itself: the rocks fall or are worn down by wind and rain; the wood rots or topples. And what happens when the boundary between what one person owns and what another person owns falls, or fails? Then what?

Today’s poem references “Mending Wall” as a way to talk about divisiveness in our country. The speaker considers that paradox of unity and separation, finding it in more and more places as the years pass.

Something there is that doesn’t love
by Armen Davoudian

We’re in Deutsche camp,
which is a tasteless joke
my friend with the undercut
trolls out of history
like a limp goldfish pulled
out of its bowl. In fact 
we’re in Middlebury, VT,
summer of ‘14,
and I’ve vowed to unlearn English
for six weeks, so I can get 
more Rilke and an A.

But mostly we play soccer,
shirtless against the shirts,
and afterwards we screw
as twenty-somethings do.
We even fall in love,
whispering in the dark
of the campus graveyard
under the sacred oath
of German 101:
—Ich liebe dich, mein Liebling!
—Und ich dich liebe auch!

Weekends we go to Ripton
to hike the Robert Frost 
Interpretive Trail.
Yes, there’s a wood with a road
splitting in it, a pile
of timber forever rotting
with the burning of decay
(for the world will end in fire)
and last, the wall! Its faded
placard reads, Something
there is that doesn’t love.

It’s 2016,
all that is history. 
Now I know lieben  from leben,
but Rilke in German feels
like a fish out of water.
The president believes
good fences make good neighbors.
The roads remain divided.
Undercuts are in. 
Something that doesn’t love
burns on the streets again.

"Something there is that doesn’t love" by Armen Davoudian from THE PALACE OF FORTY PILLARS © 2024 Armen Davoudian. Used by permission of the poet.