I’m at the weeds growing into my fence,
not the mulberry the previous owners
let intertwine with the chain-link, the woodened
stalks now inseparable from steel, but winter
creeper I rip out of the ground and fence line,
the winter creeper that crawled up and into
my neighbor’s tree, a venous strangulation
leading to half the elm peeling away
during a thunderstorm, taking with it
my power line and four sections of fence.
The power company restored the line,
and the next day they broke down with chain saws
what elm was dying in our yards but took
none of it with them. My neighbor stopped by
to apologize, though didn’t say for what.
Maybe the invasive growth he never
sought to stop, but I couldn’t be certain,
I really don’t know him, only his name
and address, plus that we both used to live
in an Ohio city and somehow
convinced a bank to give us mortgages
for homes and yards. I thought I was clever
as a young man, convinced money’s not real,
just changing ledger numbers, but scientists
have shown if you don’t have much, odds increase
your arteries can harden through, your heart
shoving the blood so hard that you die younger.
Broke and hypertensive in Ohio,
I only heard my doctor tell me to change
what I put in my body and exercise,
to quit worrying and always remember
prevention’s everything. I’m trying to
destroy these vines and do my little part
to stop this threat to our ecology,
but I don’t know where it starts or how any
suffocation gets where it has gotten,
I just keep uprooting. Winter creeper
survives by letting go, an easy loosing
of limbs to save some inextricable
heart I imagine living in the earth.
It may not matter I don’t know my neighbor,
but I’d sure like his help, and research
has also shown that when I speak and he
hears and speaks back and I hear and speak back,
even just complaining about the vines
or how we go about getting insurance
to mend this fence, take all this tree away,
it’s cause enough for my body to leach
different chemicals into my bloodstream
when I see him, the vasodilation
starting as I relax and think more clearly,
and I am thinking to ask where in Columbus
he lived when I feel the next abstraction twinging
in my chest, this null-like hypothesis
that there could be no heart for me to find.
Chain-link
Clayton Adam Clark lives in St. Louis, his hometown, where he works as a public health researcher and volunteers for River Styx magazine. His debut poetry collection, A Finitude of Skin (Moon City Press, 2018), won the Moon City Poetry Award. He is a recipient of an Artist Support Grant from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, and his poems appear in Salamander, Ocean City Review, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in poetry at Ohio State University and recently completed his master’s in clinical mental health counseling at University of Missouri-St. Louis.