Sunday melancholy has me walking ocean.
The water not blue, but a September warm.

I traverse dull stones that pinch my soles,
I jump into a pile of leaves raked when I was eight

still in the yard of 196. A memory melted and frozen.
A snowman on day three whose carrot stick nose has been eaten.

Stomach facing the sky, I am driftwood
drifting from who knows where—weathered soft and gray and new.

A philosophy of repurposing: apple cores fed to chickens,
fish bones scattered near roots of plants.

If I could tend to olive trees, release weight off their limbs,
but Long Island soil grows spuds;

we dig hand shovels into earthworms for Adirondack Reds, 
we dig for clams, for grade school lunch and recess

when we ran from being tagged, from being it.
A moat protected my sand dripped castle.

I am still its occupant, shiny skin and floral,
attracting bees has never been hard.