weddings and barbed wire

In my hunt for the perfect wedding poem, i stumbled across this work about a guy who has been fixing barbed wire fences his whole life. It's out of the collection "Gutter Flowers" by Don Welch. This poem has nothing to do with weddings, but i thought it sounded real nice anyway.


"At the Edge of Town"

Hard to know which is more gnarled,
the posts he hammers staples into
or the blue hummocks that run across his hands like molehills.

Work has reduced his wrists
to bones, cut out of him
the easy flesh and brought him
down to this, the crowbar's teeth

Caught just behind a barb.
Again this morning
the crowbar's neck will make
its blue slip into wood,

there will be that moment
when too much strength
will cause the wire to break.
But even at 70, he says,

he has to have it right,
and more than right.
This morning, in the pewter light,
he has the scars to prove it.