My thirty-third summer.
The dispassionate lake of adulthood widening.

While others were discussing
the styles of metopes,
I lay down in the Temple of Zeus

I could be a statue or a pine tree.
The love-canceling hours are gone.
There is no ick factor.

The tent men arrived bearing sledgehammers
and were young enough to be my sons.  
After rolling out the canvas, they drove rods 

It’s nice to have a lake to love me,
that can see under all my disguises—
where there is only animal survival

The leopard cannot change his spots (they’re sewn
into his fur), yet he licks them through and through.

Each of you who writes reports illness, pain from love
      spilt

I was looking 
for the two 
black men

Tide was in when we waded into the idle current.
In a scorpion’s spinal curve, it would tow us miles
into the ocean’s briny green-white surf.

Such is the way with monumental things:
to make us see and wonder.