1.

Three or four a day, my neighbor
took down
the twenty Douglas firs that grew for
fifteen years
along the wooden privacy fence which
separates us
not as much as the palisade about
his heart.

The chain saw entered my house’s
every room,
no escaping the shrill cry that cut to the marrow
and then
the dead time when my neighbor rested,
the cry always
hanging in the air,
unfinished.

Each morning now unfiltered sun bleeds through
my eyelids
into the dreamworld spinning
behind them.

Even so, I’ve slowly unclosed my eyes to the germination, then blossoming,
of another truth:
Patches of brown lawn once shadowed by fir trees have turned bright green
in sunlight, every blade a lit candle,
and the weeping willow that grows beside the fence kites skyward in wind,
trailing its sleeves through dusty air,
while my fruit tree, ablaze in rebirth, dangles new clusters of oranges,
each pendulous ‘O’ like a little sun
in a solar system of little suns and forming at their centers, tiny oval moons,
the seeds of their potential.

2.

My neighbor planted in me the seeds of
sorrowful rage.
I found a way not to water them,
like the father
who started a scholarship fund
at the school
where his son, a sapling of fifteen,
was cut down
by a schoolmate demanding
twenty dollars.

With a fund, the father said, my boy didn’t
die in vain.

I want to believe in this theory of evolution,
out of something bad, something good,
something grafted onto the soul,
that fragile sprig.

“If you’re lucky enough to live in a beach town, you’re lucky enough.”
--a visitor to Jacksonville Beach, Florida

As breath knows air, I know this town:
A farrago of wide-eyed cottages
melding the relaxed and the poor,
people living as they want,
peninsulas of themselves.

Here, winter is always heavy with spring,
and spring soon swells with summer.

Somewhere else, hail rains down like horses’ hooves,
and a wolfish wind circles homes.
Whole neighborhoods dream of summer,
of a town such as ours where wind is a gentle sway,
and palms bend like old men listening
to the immutable wisdom of the ocean,
every wave a turquoise tongue.

Somewhere else, weather is a witches’ brew, a nest of aggravation.
The heart seeks escape the way hunger seeks the bowl,
and people there slip away to cottages of the mind
in a town winter can never know as summer does,
as sea knows salt.