She has never built sandcastles.
She has never toed the surf along the Gulf of Mexico.
She's only ever known these mountains;
these cold, granite monuments to impassibility
that reduce the sky to slits,
somehow managing to make the heavens smaller.

Half closed eyelids with their own trap-door gravity.

Short lives last eternities too
and there is beauty to be had
- even here -
It's just that everyone should get to build sandcastles sometimes.

Close your eyes

Your world, not extending
beyond the soft quilt under
your skin, unending


Soft ripples of cloth, and picturesque seams
Nothing here but
You, me, the sky, and soft dreams

I'll reach up and take the stars from the sky
If only to lay them at your feet
to place them in your hands
to bring light into those glazed eyes
or give a glow to a world so bland

and each one would be folded
into a beautiful origami castle
I, the lord, and you, the vassal
Or perhaps me as the king
and you as a queen, whichever
My gentle playmate.. which one is better?

I'm a majestic creature of the sky
You're an empty-faced child on a quilt
Each star shall be used as a stepping stone
so I might meet you in the place I built


Let us meet, as lovers, or
at least equals
on this starry floor

The setting of traps
has always seemed
like a tacit endorsement
of the mice.

Acknowledgement.
Validation.
Admission of failings as a homeowner –
(cracked baseboards or an unsealed gap in the door.)

We are usually responsible
for our own infestations, after all.

The relationship with the mice is codified
“you are vermin,
I am not.
I will ****.
You will die.”

Thus the mice are transfigured,
Christ-like.
Frozen in fear,
frozen in time,
laid bare
on a sticky, chemical
altar of sacrifice.

Saviors
giving their lives
so that we may preserve
those unwanted crumbs
in the vacant space
between the couch and loveseat
where the vacuum won’t reach.

We chanced in passing by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of special picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees,
Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass,
The little cottage we were speaking of,
A front with just a door between two windows,
Fresh painted by the shower a velvet black.
We paused, the minister and I, to look.
He made as if to hold it at arm’s length
Or put the leaves aside that framed it in.
“Pretty,” he said. “Come in. No one will care.”
The path was a vague parting in the grass
That led us to a weathered window-sill.
We pressed our faces to the pane. “You see,” he said,
“Everything’s as she left it when she died.
Her sons won’t sell the house or the things in it.
They say they mean to come and summer here
Where they were boys. They haven’t come this year.
They live so far away—one is out west—
It will be hard for them to keep their word.
Anyway they won’t have the place disturbed.”
A buttoned hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms
Under a crayon portrait on the wall
Done sadly from an old daguerreotype.
“That was the father as he went to war.
She always, when she talked about war,
Sooner or later came and leaned, half knelt
Against the lounge beside it, though I doubt
If such unlifelike lines kept power to stir
Anything in her after all the years.
He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg,
I ought to know—it makes a difference which:
Fredericksburg wasn’t Gettysburg, of course.
But what I’m getting to is how forsaken
A little cottage this has always seemed;
Since she went more than ever, but before—
I don’t mean altogether by the lives
That had gone out of it, the father first,
Then the two sons, till she was left alone.
(Nothing could draw her after those two sons.
She valued the considerate neglect
She had at some cost taught them after years.)
I mean by the world’s having passed it by—
As we almost got by this afternoon.
It always seems to me a sort of mark
To measure how far fifty years have brought us.
Why not sit down if you are in no haste?
These doorsteps seldom have a visitor.
The warping boards pull out their own old nails
With none to tread and put them in their place.
She had her own idea of things, the old lady.
And she liked talk. She had seen Garrison
And Whittier, and had her story of them.
One wasn’t long in learning that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War was for
It wasn’t just to keep the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn’t have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases—so removed
From the world’s view to-day of all those things.
That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn’t true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.
You couldn’t tell her what the West was saying,
And what the South to her serene belief.
She had some art of hearing and yet not
Hearing the latter wisdom of the world.
White was the only race she ever knew.
Black she had scarcely seen, and yellow never.
But how could they be made so very unlike
By the same hand working in the same stuff?
She had supposed the war decided that.
What are you going to do with such a person?
Strange how such innocence gets its own way.
I shouldn’t be surprised if in this world
It were the force that would at last prevail.
Do you know but for her there was a time
When to please younger members of the church,
Or rather say non-members in the church,
Whom we all have to think of nowadays,
I would have changed the Creed a very little?
Not that she ever had to ask me not to;
It never got so far as that; but the bare thought
Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,
And of her half asleep was too much for me.
Why, I might wake her up and startle her.
It was the words ‘descended into Hades’
That seemed too pagan to our liberal youth.
You know they suffered from a general onslaught.
And well, if they weren’t true why keep right on
Saying them like the heathen? We could drop them.
Only—there was the bonnet in the pew.
Such a phrase couldn’t have meant much to her.
But suppose she had missed it from the Creed
As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,
And falls asleep with heartache—how should I feel?
I’m just as glad she made me keep hands off,
For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favour.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk
Blown over and over themselves in idleness.
Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew
The babe born to the desert, the sand storm
****** mid-waste my cowering caravans—

“There are bees in this wall.” He struck the clapboards,
Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.

“Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,
As reckless as the best of them to-night,
By setting fire to all the brush we piled
With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow.
Oh, let’s not wait for rain to make it safe.
The pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough
Down dark converging paths between the pines.
Let’s not care what we do with it to-night.
Divide it? No! But burn it as one pile
The way we piled it. And let’s be the talk
Of people brought to windows by a light
Thrown from somewhere against their wall-paper.
Rouse them all, both the free and not so free
With saying what they’d like to do to us
For what they’d better wait till we have done.
Let’s all but bring to life this old volcano,
If that is what the mountain ever was—
And scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will…”

“And scare you too?” the children said together.

“Why wouldn’t it scare me to have a fire
Begin in smudge with ropy smoke and know
That still, if I repent, I may recall it,
But in a moment not: a little spurt
Of burning fatness, and then nothing but
The fire itself can put it out, and that
By burning out, and before it burns out
It will have roared first and mixed sparks with stars,
And sweeping round it with a flaming sword,
Made the dim trees stand back in wider circle—
Done so much and I know not how much more
I mean it shall not do if I can bind it.
Well if it doesn’t with its draft bring on
A wind to blow in earnest from some quarter,
As once it did with me upon an April.
The breezes were so spent with winter blowing
They seemed to fail the bluebirds under them
Short of the perch their languid flight was toward;
And my flame made a pinnacle to heaven
As I walked once round it in possession.
But the wind out of doors—you know the saying.
There came a gust. You used to think the trees
Made wind by fanning since you never knew
It blow but that you saw the trees in motion.
Something or someone watching made that gust.
It put the flame tip-down and dabbed the grass
Of over-winter with the least tip-touch
Your tongue gives salt or sugar in your hand.
The place it reached to blackened instantly.
The black was all there was by day-light,
That and the merest curl of cigarette smoke—
And a flame slender as the hepaticas,
Blood-root, and violets so soon to be now.
But the black spread like black death on the ground,
And I think the sky darkened with a cloud
Like winter and evening coming on together.
There were enough things to be thought of then.
Where the field stretches toward the north
And setting sun to Hyla brook, I gave it
To flames without twice thinking, where it verges
Upon the road, to flames too, though in fear
They might find fuel there, in withered brake,
Grass its full length, old silver golden-rod,
And alder and grape vine entanglement,
To leap the dusty deadline. For my own
I took what front there was beside. I knelt
And ****** hands in and held my face away.
Fight such a fire by rubbing not by beating.
A board is the best weapon if you have it.
I had my coat. And oh, I knew, I knew,
And said out loud, I couldn’t bide the smother
And heat so close in; but the thought of all
The woods and town on fire by me, and all
The town turned out to fight for me—that held me.
I trusted the brook barrier, but feared
The road would fail; and on that side the fire
Died not without a noise of crackling wood—
Of something more than tinder-grass and ****—
That brought me to my feet to hold it back
By leaning back myself, as if the reins
Were round my neck and I was at the plough.
I won! But I’m sure no one ever spread
Another color over a tenth the space
That I spread coal-black over in the time
It took me. Neighbors coming home from town
Couldn’t believe that so much black had come there
While they had backs turned, that it hadn’t been there
When they had passed an hour or so before
Going the other way and they not seen it.
They looked about for someone to have done it.
But there was no one. I was somewhere wondering
Where all my weariness had gone and why
I walked so light on air in heavy shoes
In spite of a scorched Fourth-of-July feeling.
Why wouldn’t I be scared remembering that?”

“If it scares you, what will it do to us?”

“Scare you. But if you shrink from being scared,
What would you say to war if it should come?
That’s what for reasons I should like to know—
If you can comfort me by any answer.”

“Oh, but war’s not for children—it’s for men.”

“Now we are digging almost down to China.
My dears, my dears, you thought that—we all thought it.
So your mistake was ours. Haven’t you heard, though,
About the ships where war has found them out
At sea, about the towns where war has come
Through opening clouds at night with droning speed
Further o’erhead than all but stars and angels,—
And children in the ships and in the towns?
Haven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?
Nothing so new—something we had forgotten:
War is for everyone, for children too.
I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.
The best way is to come up hill with me
And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.”

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.

it was the first time I'd
realized
that.

We have the full complement of the requisite barriers:
Barbed wire, barren landscape, unpleasant canines,
Stark metallic towers with vaguely menacing turrets and gunsights
(Though they are remote, poorly lighted,
Perched high enough that I suspect they may be occupied
By mannequins or scarecrows),
And what cannot be attained physically
Is augmented by other means,
Breakfasts at mid-day, bits of bread in the blackest part of night,
Light as dark, dark as light.
We tell our company this and that of the news of the world:
Half–and-quarter-truths, innuendos of some plausibility,
Outright truths as well, but told with the most outrageous leers,
Put forth in a tone which suggest that such things could never be,
(I have come to appreciate Pilate’s question,
For truth is a singular thing,
Valid within the limits of one’s mind,
No more than a lower-case notion
When butting up against those of others),
And I tell myself that this is all something that needs to be done,
That perhaps there is no greater good
Than a certain regularity,a certain order of things,
But I am unsettled by the memory of an episode
Some three days past, where one of this assemblage
(I suspect the person in question was female,
But we keep our band well-shorn, and they are costumed
In rather shapeless and gray tunics
Which, given the lapse of time
And the long intervals between our own re-supply,
Look suspiciously like our own garments)
Look in my direction with what fervor she could muster,
All but barking You! You will be forgiven none of this!
And I was left perplexed by her admonition,
Which, as I began to readying myself for dinner
(Scrubbing my neck, my face, my hands,
Trying to rid myself of the damnable dust
Which is omnipresent, unavoidable, beyond eradication)
Lingered, as I could not for the life of me
Comprehend the calculus which would mark me,
A relative speck, a cog, a mere functionary,
As the one to be singled out.

He is, to his way of thinking, the only one wearing shorts;
The nine young men with him, baggy-wearing and body-pierced,
Swoosh-adorned from head to toe,
Sporting something which seem close kin
To blown-up Bermudas or women’s culottes.
Back in the day they would have been laughed right off the courts,
But it is not his day any longer, as he is constantly reminded;
He wears shorts that merit the term, old leather Converse All-Stars
Cracked and faded as the berm of the back roads
In this out-of-the way locale,
A faded and decades-laundered jersey
Bearing the name of a long-defunct auto dealership.
The kids call him “Jumping Toyota.”
Yo, Toyota—no dunkin’ on us tonight, OK?
Hollering and laughing as they dap and jump-and-bump,
Mimicking playground ballers in cities
They have never been within three hundred miles of,
And he smiles in grim resignation,
Knowing he might get a fingertip on the rim on a good day.
His game is strictly cerebral, horizontal now,
The muted, pastel joy of a solid, timely pick
Or well-thrown bounce pass
Has become his vehicle of blacktop epiphany,
And he eases up now and then on the offensive end
To provide succor to tendons and ligaments
Which, in spite of admonitions to himself
That at your age you need to take it easy, *******
Will still register their protests a very few hours from now
Leading to tortured grimaces and the occasional audible grunt,
As he holds his place on the third-shift line at the Alcoa plant
Bringing his co-workers to ask him,
In that hazy place between bemused and stupefied
Man, don’t tell me you’re still playin’ ball?
Once in a while, though, he will still drive hard towards the tin
And, eighteen again for the a snapshot of a moment,
He will stop on a dime and drop a jump shot
Making no noise whatsoever
Save for the whispery snap of the bottom of the net,
Sound every bit the same as it was
Before his knees and ankles went rogue.
Outside the chain-link fence, a young man plugged into his iPod
Bobs his head in time to some unheard song
As he leans in an approximation of nonchalance
Against a great old elm tree
(Branches bedraggled and drooping,
Giving it the air of some old warlock gesturing in mock-menace
Though his wand has gone a-gleaming,
His magic having deserted him as well)
Which bears a large painted orange circle
Signifying its imminent destruction.

Three days, is what the HR rep said, somewhat sheepishly,
As if she was fully aware that boxing up one’s grief
In a span of a few dozen hours
Is a matter of wishful thinking
And certainly she sympathizes
(Indeed, as she speaks,
She spreads her hands in such a way
As you half expect doves to come forth in full flight)
Empathy being their stock in trade,
But the law and the handbook say three days,
And then you need to have your head
******* back on and looking forward.

Eventually, the mail brings fewer envelopes
Marked with embossed flowers
And subdued and tasteful stamps,
The usual flow of solicitous inquiries,
Pre-stamped and pre-sorted,
Inquiring as to your credit needs,
The condition of your windows and siding,
Resumes apace, and more than once,
In fits of inappropriate black humor and frustration,
You scribble, in bold thick strokes of a marker,
The addressee no longer resides at this location.

You return to nine-to-five,
Though your ghosts keep their own hours,
Stopping by to visit on their own schedule alone,
Prompted by the tiniest of things:
The dog scampering to its feet in a hurry,
As if someone was at the door,
The discovery of a long-unused pitching wedge
Standing expectantly in the back of the closet,
A song from long ago which was beloved
When you lived in the pairing mandated by Noah
Before you entered the shadow world of ones and nones.
Sometimes you give into the giddy madness,
And rise to waltz around the room,
Careening about unsteadily, clumsily
As you have yet to completely master
The difference in weight shift and distribution
That is required of a solo act.
The timing of these visitations
Often disrupts your schedule and sleep patterns,
And you think that perhaps tomorrow you’ll call in.