“The Fence” by V.P. Loggins
These fragments I have shored against my ruins —T. S. Eliot
And now I keep remembering
the bucket and the broad-bristled brush,
the stain being slathered on the fence
and flecking the cut grass with white,
his T-shirted back and haunches lathered
like a horse’s in the unforgiving sun
of an August afternoon, unbothered by
the fierce heat, bent on staying ahead
of the predicted storm. He said it may
seem foolish to stain the fence white
before a rain, but acknowledging that
miracles can happen he added smiling,
Jesus walked on water. Thus, his stain
seemed to affix itself like a hue of faith,
like words now carved into Heaney’s stone
set in the soil of his Bellaghy grave:
Walk on air against your better judgement.
The way these words adhere to the fence
that I am building, slat by painted slat,
beam by horizontal beam of memory
where now, like the back-and-forth flash
of his bristled brush, his voice returns:
If you know a storm is coming, son,
shore something up against your losses.
V. P. Loggins is the author of The Wild Severance (2021), winner of the 26th Annual Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition, The Green Cup (2017), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Book Prize, The Fourth Paradise (Editor’s Select Poetry Series, Main Street Rag 2010), and Heaven Changes (Pudding House Chapbook Series 2007). A Lively Mask, winner of the 2025 Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award from Codhill Press, is forthcoming. He has also published one book on Shakespeare, The Life of Our Design, and he is co-author of another, Shakespeare’s Deliberate Art. His poems and articles have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Chiron Review, Crannog (Ireland), The Dalhousie Review (Canada), The Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review and Willow Review, among others. He holds a doctorate in English Renaissance literature and has taught at several institutions, including Purdue University and the United States Naval Academy.