Journal Sixty-Five Planks I've Walked

I read a lot today. I embroidered a little. I plan to embroider more. Something about the night always makes me want to embroider then. Maybe I need a gaslight. A gaslight and a rocking chair and a trusty hound. Bah, I don't want any of those things, not really.

I had a dream last night about two snakes. One was good and the other was bad, but in the end, they both ran away. The journal poem today is based on a mysterious dumpster full of wood I saw outside my house today. It was there while I ate lunch and then it was gone. I never saw anyone take it, it just wasn't there anymore.

Misplacement

Someone left a dumpster
outside his sinking duplex.

He doesn't know
how to tell if wood is rotted,
but the wood in this dumpster
is rotted.

Or maybe it's burned;
it's black and flaking,
but it's probably soft too.
He likens it to a mattress,
a sinking mattress.

If the wood is burned,
maybe his neighbor's house
burned in the night
without him noticing.

How did he not notice?
There is food in his beard.
He does not notice.

He checks out the side window.
The neighbor's house is there,
but the dumpster of wood
has been taken like an egg.

He thinks maybe a ship
wrecked on his street,
all hands down, loot sliding
through the postal slot drain.

There's a mast in his yard.
How did he not notice?
It looks a lot like a tree.
In the crow's nest, there are crows.

Something winks on the sidewalk.
He thinks he better get it
before the crows come down
and pick at it like it owes money.
Maybe it's a doubloon.

When he goes out
to pick up the wink,
he's careful on the porch
because it bows like sheet forts
strung over chairs.
One sure step and it would all
come tumbling down,
come tumbling down.

There are clouds over the block,
shade from rootless trees on wings.

He has never read cloud shapes,
though once, on the Fourth of July,
a cloud of firework smoke
was shaped exactly like him.

He thinks the clouds
must be heavy. If they fell,
they would leave a crater
big enough to fill
with years of dishwater.

The wink is a doubloon
from the sinking of a ship,
but the doubloon is shaped
exactly like an American penny.

He picks it up and eyes the crows
looking down from their crow's nest,
it too sinking in the middle
from the weight of so many wings.

One of them ka-caws a threat
and he realizes he owes them money.
He tosses the doubloon up
and the ka-cawer comes down
to grab it from the air.

He thinks there should be flags
or at least a flag, but they probably
left on the wind, or else they too
were snatched from the air by crows.

The dumpster is back again,
but this time it's not full of wood.
It's full of something else.
He struggles to find a word for it,
but there are no words
for what he peers in to see.