A History

I. Visit 1 
 
Philoctetes

I was not her high school sweetheart
(though she was mine), merely a sans culotte
strayed from the wrong side of the city
dated for a spring, dropped, forgot.

By chance we met again fifty years later.
In that span I reared a seaside pile
on a granite cliff Down East
with cedar shingles and tall glass to watch  
the North Atlantic gnaw its rock,
laid down claret, vintage port,
lined the walls with unquiet post-war art –
at the foot of the grand stair, sixteen feet tall,
Kiefer’s poisoned Rhine flowed across the wall –
and in that company dwelt on my sawdust past.  
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