Click. Clack. Struck-wicket thud. Human ex
clamations, mannerly. Such are the sounds
of croquet, carried by an idle breeze.
Saltwater, just beyond, is steely blue,
bedecked by mooring-balls and colored buoys,
beneath a sky where tufts of cirrus hang
like combings from a pampered, moon-white dog.
Vacationland, all bays and sails and trees.
The lumbermen who rafted logs downstream,
the fishermen whose slickers gleamed through storms,
as did the struggling silver in their nets,
impart, though dead, a hardness to this coast
where, mornings, wickets on their vacant courts
make, with their shadows, rhomboidal pairs of wings.
***
Maine mountains, vestiges of Ap
palachians once mightier than Rockies,
have balding tops, like men, and crumbling sides
that seek to fill the sea with scree and piles
of giant building blocks for reassembly
next aeon. Rocking on the Claremont porch
in my fortuity and gazing past
the croquet court and sail-filled, too-blue bay
and shoreline summer homes to pine-dark slopes
that hide their hiking trails, I see a spot,
below the crest, a broad gray bare spot where I
would like to be, like very much, so much
a lightning crackle floods my chest with pain:
the viewer, like the view, is wearing out.
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