Walls

A while back I was reading about Trump’s doubtful claim that women were being driven in cars across the Southern border for the purpose of sex trafficking. It made me think about walls in terms of the atavistic desire of any group, including protective fathers, to keep their daughters and wives away from the hands of outsiders.

Walls can’t stop night-blooming jasmine
from breaking and entering, can’t shut out
the tump da tump of the railroad ties,
 
a train whistle’s minor key turning
the lock in the door. That’s why fathers
build walls around their daughters,
 
who sooner or later welcome a lover
who’ll crash the gate like a freeloader,
flipping the latch with one prurient finger.
 
But fathers tell us we’ll always be prey
without a wall’s adobe bravura, straw
or wood or bricks well-laid. A wall
 
that glows when the sunset redlines it,
long before the hour fathers find
us lying in our beds, our defenses
 
down, our fences down; we’re closing
our blue-veined lids—worried thin.
But fathers warn us the roof’s a flint,
 
primed for sparks, every flame on call.
Nightmares scale us like migrants,
flout our fences, mole under borders.
 
We break out like prisoners of war
with maps that show where oceans rise,
the snow redacting our footprints.

The fairytale half-way house a myth.
Its walls smug with gingerbread that
sickens the blood. Flight a false lure,
 
because sooner or later the woodstove
ingests both the witch and her guests.
The only thing real is our fear.