Uneasy Fantasia from Quarry Hollow

In the back yard a mound of jumbled stone, overrun
with weeds and creepers, maybe an old barn, a wall,

a fortress, trees grown up in it, a lesson in texture
and limestone, gravity and the inscrutable past

and the space it allows for speculations of all sorts,
tedious, whimsical, brutal, just as the uneven planks

of the new picnic table invite complaints on the slovenly
craftsmanship of people these days. All of which

may interest only a man like me, cooling from my bike ride
on a sunny September day on this island, or The Island

as I nearly wrote before tripping over guilty recognition
of the many layers of my privilege. The Pope is in

New York, urging attention to the poor and the melting
of Greenland. My wife didn’t pick up and is probably

out shopping. Both daughters-in-law are pregnant,
though we’re not supposed to tell yet. I rode

every road on the island and some of them twice,
sweaty and happy, passed three golf carts and many

slow couples, all of us moving, some of us young.
There’s music and laughter, wind in the trees,

there’s no time and all time, crows, sparrows, chimes
and confessions. A moment in the giddy whirl

of the world. Moss on the stones. Sun on the moss.