Closing the Beach House

Turning back like a window
set to the change of weathers:
inside, old cabinets; the phone
pulled from the wall, roots hanging
bare

I am come strange
a rootless garden

Only slowly words surface:
ghosts with sad mouths moving
staring in blank soil
and in the unclosing
wind

hard conjugations, lies,
the dead

windows where we cried
at the flood-
time, the seedlings bent, all
leaves like feathers,
blood tipped

marriage an old house
empty

Somewhere, Malibu, perhaps
the fish flap
silver bellied on the sand
moon spawn, fire
gutted on your spit

here my eyelids close
over my own

death
it is all fragment
an archaeology claiming
by touch, by pain
the doorsills, the dry rot

eating the heartwood
hollow

(this is a very old poem; it was printed in kayak. It was one of the first poems of my apprentice years that I really liked, that felt sound. I was touched to receive an email a few years ago from someone who teaches poetry who said this poem had reached him when he was a young man and going through a difficult time. He'd taken the poem and done a watercolor and framed them.
To know that for decades someone had cherished my words, reading his life into them, was a remarkable gift.)