Click. Clack. Struck-wicket thud. Human ex-

clamations, mannerly. Such are the sounds

of croquet, carried by an idle breeze.

Saltwater, just beyond, is steely blue,

bedecked by mooring-balls and colored buoys,

beneath a sky where tufts of cirrus hang

like combings from a pampered, moon-white dog.

Vacationland, all bays and sails and trees.

The lumbermen who rafted logs downstream,

the fishermen whose slickers gleamed through storms,

as did the struggling silver in their nets,

impart, though dead, a hardness to this coast

where, mornings, wickets on their vacant courts

make, with their shadows, rhomboidal pairs of wings.

Maine mountains, vestiges of Ap-

palachians once mightier than Rockies,

have balding tops, like men, and crumbling sides

that seek to fill the sea with scree and piles

of giant building blocks for reassembly

next aeon. Rocking on the Claremont porch

in my fortuity and gazing past

the croquet court and sail-filled, too-blue bay

and shoreline summer homes to pine-dark slopes

that hide their hiking trails, I see a spot,

below the crest, a broad gray bare spot where I

would like to be, like very much, so much

a lightning crackle floods my chest with pain:

the viewer, like the view, is wearing out.