I wanted a wall to kneel before, planting hollyhocks.
Yes, a folly — more whimsy than work,
crooked if that’s what it took. I wanted to be seven
for a day in a playhouse my father built,
though he was never that sort of man. I’d need
a hook for my hat and a hook for my jacket
on a tugboat sailing through the birches, pulling
(at a safe distance) the rest of the world.
It would be a blind, too, where we’d hide to watch
the black bear saunter down our apple-tree-trail,
and the fall buck scrape the velvet from his antlers
on anything handy, anything hard. I wanted
to paint clean pine boards in the autumn
with long brushstrokes, the way you run your hand
across a horse’s back, from the withers to the rump.
If I closed my eyes and said, “There’s no place
like home,” where would the whirlwind take me?