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.