'I Love You, Vagrant, with My Own Self-Love'

We spent much of Christmas Day taking down the wooden fence at the back of our yard, a simple structure of four-by-four posts, six-foot planks for pickets and horizontal two-by-fours holding them all in place. The rot was so advanced in places, you could poke a hole in the wood with your finger. Decay is a structural element in Houston.

 

The previous owner of the lot behind us was an elderly physician whose hobby in retirement was tree-grafting. I think of him as Dr. Moreau. He combined various strains of citrus and created thorn-covered trees that bear beautiful, inedible fruit. This time of year, dozens of grapefruit-sized, orange-colored globes hang like ornaments from the branches. Even the squirrels won’t eat them. Throw in vines and various shrubs and you have an impassable barrier, most of it previously invisible on the other side of the old wooden fence. Last week we put a letter in the current owner’s mailbox saying we planned to replace the fence, and he never replied. We learned online this guy owes the city tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid property taxes. Robert Frost was right.          

 

We had exchanged gifts earlier. I found four books under the tree: Whitney Balliett’s American Musicians II: Seventy-One Portraits in Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1996); Aaron Poochigian’s Manhattanite (Able Muse Press, 2017); Jay Parini’s Borges and Me (Doubleday, 2020); and American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition (Library of America, 2020), edited by Andrew J. Bacevich. Balliett’s book I’ve read many times but I thought it was time I owned a copy. I love the zest and odd rightness of Poochigian’s word choices. He has unexpected sympathies and enthusiasms, as in “Derelicts”:

 

“I love you, vagrant, with my own self-love 

because I see myself there sleeping rough

on rubbish under a construction scaffold.

Because I hear my future in your cough . . .”

 

On Friday we sank steel posts for the new fence and poured cement. Today, we’ll put up the cedar planks that are drying in the garage and make it smell like the chest in which my mother hid our Christmas presents when we were kids.