Austeria

It was neither night nor day.

A rise of rabbits in dusty crates girded the shore:

Lostland driftwood vigil, mute and gray.

I swung barefoot, sweeping the straw air.

The breeze was warm, but the earth was cold.

My glass-eye agape, I spun gold sand through my hands

To green fields that opened, stretching up

Past salt-spit stones to faraway pale,

Where the lilac lilted out,

Spilling crepe trumpets,

Violet tumbled glacéed notes.

Skirt-tucked, I wished to run to the fragrant blooms,

But first I had to unbox my shoes,

Lacing grommets over canvas tongues.

When done, I rose, but she was gone.

Instead a hundred folks spackled over the field,

Bent on writing their own cribbed words,

Troubling rocks, cuckooing through rills~~

Versifying the earth.

Before long, a town grew up yellow and brown

And I was looking for you in flat places,

where you might have pressed through:

buttons & books         badges & signs

Inhaling your name off the pavement,

Querying letterboxes with my palms.

Heat-seeking, I had come to the end of the world.

I found a clear pool

Where a little girl held a turtle,

Black with carmine-etched lines.

She’d let it swim a few strokes ahead,

Then catch it and laugh as its legs pulsed in vain.

While thousands of miles away

The speckled olive damask of the Pike

Moved unseen below the ice,

Waiting, waiting . . . .