The Fort by Marie Howe

The Fort

 

It was a kind of igloo

made from branches and weeds, a dome

with an aboveground tunnel entrance

the boys crawled through on their knees,

and a campfire in the center

because smoke came out of a hole in the roof,

and we couldn’t go there. I

don’t even remember trying, not

inside. Although I remember

a deal we didn’t keep—so many

Dr Peppers which nobody drank,

and my brother standing outside it

like a chief: bare-chested, weary

from labor, proud, dignified,

and talking to us as if we could never

understand a thing he said because

he had made this thing and we had not,

and could not have done it, not

in a thousand years—true knowledge

and disdain when he looked at us.

For those weeks the boys didn’t chase us.

They busied themselves with patching

the fort and sweeping the dirt outside

the entrance, a village of boys

who had a house to clean, women

in magazines, cigarettes and soda and

the strange self-contained voices they used

to speak to each other with.

And we approached the clearing where

their fort was like deer in winter

hungry for any small thing—what

they had made without us.

We wanted to watch them live there.