The Birthday Drill

My wife has given me a new drill,
a DeWalt 20 volt battery-
powered model with joyous yellow
highlights, the color of doing.
It fits my hand like love, a perfect
balance, easy to hold, to wield,
and I am a child again, kneeling
by scraps of wood, sinking screws and nails,
one after the other, making
crazy, top-heavy ships that capsized
in the yard’s grassy swales and weird
wheelless trains that chugged through my childhood
while I was sound effects and motive
force and engineer. I made bent-nail
antennas, periscopes, and smoke stacks—
hours in hammering cast-off wood
to fantasy’s imagined adventures.
Now, my new drill in hand, I sink
extra anchor screws in every board
right down the fence, making more sturdy
my great wall to keep jackal neighbor
hordes from streaming across my border
and flooding my quarter acre
of western culture with their heathen
children and foreign pounding music.

Staining the Fence

A century ago old Frost told us
something there is that doesn't love a wall,
meaning a fence, a border of stacked stones
in hilly New Hampshire, keeping orchards
tidy. Now I know birds don't mind a fence
or garden wall, nor do cats, not at all,
for my neighbor's cats go up and over
faster than I can hiss them gone, faster
than I can raise my arm to throw the stone
I keep ready at the door. And who knows
why I so resent the cats' slink in my yard:
something there is that doesn't love a cat,
a stranger cat, a furry interloper,
even if it keeps mice and rats at bay.
I don't have an orchard (just three modest
mandarins) or livestock (not even dogs)
or even that much land, a little corner
of an acre, but still I like a fence
to wall in what I have, to show to me
what I've amassed in the years I've labored,
to mark this territory mine and mine
(and bank's) alone. If none outlined my land,
how'd I know where to weed and what to mow?
What would save me from seeing my neighbor's
pasty legs and fish belly feet on weekends
when he roams his corner shoeless in shorts?
If I a hundred acres had, then maybe
I'd need no fence, but here, on this small plot,
with neighbors close enough to watch, I say
good fences make neighbors tolerable
if not good, make them seem farther away
than they really are, make them disappear.
I say good fences are the battlements
around my castle, so every few years
I slather them with oily redwood stain,
my spell against decay and too much sight.

May 17, 2025

About the writer

Cecil Morris has been nominated for a Pushcart in 2021, 2022, and 2023. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. He and his indulgent partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between California’s central valley and the Oregon coast.