Town fathers, what have you done? Last night I returned (I vowed — I made the 
lake a promise) intending to tramp the lane of maples, read with my palms the 
weary tombstones, feast with my eyes the clouded lake, lean with a sigh on 
founder’s headstone, chatter my verses to turtles and fish, trace with my pen 
the day lily runes, the wild grape alphabet, the anagram of fallen branches, all 
in a carpet of mottled leaves. The mute trees were all assembled. The stones — 
a little more helterskelter than before, but more or less intact — still greeted me 
as ever with their Braille assertions. The lake, unbleached solemnity of gray, 
tipped up and out against its banks to meet me. All should have been as I left it. 
Heart sinks. The eye recoils. My joy becomes an orphanage at what I see: 
from gate to bank to bend of old peninsula, across the lot and back again, sunk 
into earth and seven feet high A CHAIN LINK FENCE! Town fathers, what have 
you done? Surely the dead do not require protection? Trees do not walk. The birds 
are not endangered. How have your grandsires sinned to be enclosed in a prison yard? 
As I walk in I shudder. It is a trap now. A cul-de-sac. I think of concentration camps.

For years, art students painted here — I hear the click of camera shutters, the scratch 
of pens, the smooth pastel caress, taste the tongue lick of water color, inhale the night 
musk of oil paints. Poets and writers too, leaning on death stones, took ease and inspiration 
here, minds soaring to lake and sky. At dawn, a solitary fisherman could cast his line here. 
Some nights the ground would undulate with lovers (what harm? who now would take their 
joy between two fences?) The fence is everywhere! No angled view can exclude it. It 
checkerboards the lake, the sky, the treeline. They tell me that vandals rampaged here, 
knocked over stones, tossed markers into the outraged waves. Whose adolescents did this, 
town fathers? Yours. Stunted by rock and stunned by drugs, they came to topple a few old slabs, 
struck them because they could not strike you. Let them summon their dusky Devil, rock lyric 
and comic and paperback, blue collar magic, dime store demons — they wait and wait, blood 
dripping from dead bird sacrifice until the heavy truth engages them: The dead are dead, magic 
is empty ritual, and stubborn Satan declines to answer a teen-age telegram. Fence in your children, 
not our stones!