“Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood”

Footing our cabin’s lawn, before the wood, 
awry & uncontaining yet see walls 
deep-fissured of concrete 
that held their pleasure. Nowadays if you could 
bathe, in the far end, you’d be grassy & beat. 
Hollyhock falls

& goldenrod to seed. Summer’s fair done 
upon this mountain. Give or take a few 
New England hundred miles, 
this must be Gatsby’s terrible pool, the one 
where the Twenties drained out and what we could do— 
undefiled, ah nor defiles—

we stood to wonder. The rough bottom’s burst
with frantic plants. On Smith Point, right at the end,
around an older pool
hung over the roaring sea, except in its worst 
summers, my friend’s grandmother paddled but sunned
in circuit not, her hat horizontal.