1.
Our first home,
epitomizing necessity
was a renovated chicken’s coop
–how long had it been dormant
save for the mice, who
had yet to forsake
or neglect it, & who were
the tenants of a short lived luck?
I was eight when we joined
the mice and killed them.
Necessity was a cold
little grey-blue building, half under the fat maple
beyond the garden, to the far end
2.
Then brisk spring, they are adorning our tree
with several misshapen, red tin
buckets echoing from inside
of themselves, as the picks siphoned
plunk, plunk, & droplets of sap
joined a sort of music to the shriveled
leaves roaring between the teeth
of our rakes like an ocean
unfurls the crumbling wild
of its body -- brilliant and glittering
and when the pile’s big
flinging ourselves into it becomes
an afternoon.
3.
Smell of salt brine, of cigarettes
and sunblock, egg-fart
marshes and Mom is
calling us over to beneath our slant umbrella,
calls the lotion “Pigeon Poop”
and gobs it onto us & don’t you dare with those feet
she says, pointing out the boundary
we’re making our blanket the “Sand-Free Zone”
-- and we must rub the poop in good, because
prickly sun wants to cook us red; the soft
fluttering thuds, as three gulls and an estranged
duck land -- precisely four moments,
before they touched, were the first that I’d seen the world
slow down, light parsing through a bird’s wing -- the middle bird
as if it flies into a thickened air, became a white, sun-
tinged freckle in that frozen slab of blue and no one
saw and I went on pawing
a trench out around my castle walls.
4.
Grandma lets her smoke loose
on a wind which steadily lifts it
away and I, bent to the sand all-day,
had no word for immensity
passing thousands of granules with two younger
versions of these palms
and my yellow plastic shovel and buckets,
-- building --
such stars into a fort, a sand castle as the clueless
tides encroached a slow siege -- first,
into my moat, then
into my home.
