A fence with nothing to do

"Even the sky here in Connecticut has it,
That wry look of accomplished conspiracy,
The look of those who’ve gotten away

With a petty but regular white collar crime.
When I pick up my shirts at the laundry,
A black woman, putting down her Daily News,

Wonders why and how much longer our luck
Will hold.  'Months now and no kiss of the witch.'
The whole state overcast with such particulars.

For Emerson, a century ago and farther north,
Where the country has an ode’s jagged edges,
It was 'frolic architecture.' Frozen blue-

Print of extravagance, shapes of a shared life
Left knee-deep in transcendental drifts:
The isolate forms of snow are its hardest fact.

Down here, the plain tercets of provision do,
Their picket snow-fence peeling, gritty,
Holding nothing back, nothing in, nothing at all.''

-- From "A Winter Without Snow" (1945), by J.D. McClatchy.