A Fort (Aug 25)

Families wind around pay-to-view telescopes.
Bunkers with light fixtures stripped from ceilings,
the sockets hanging. Warped cast-iron doors,
iron bars bent in windows, the frames removed.
A tour bus circles the cul-de-sac before the lighthouse.
And the smell of lighter fluid fills the trees.
At land’s-end, a footpath wanders through poison ivy
yielding to a lookout or a gun brace, but the area’s pacified,
its weakness transformed to pacific strength,
the gutted interior cleaned of debris, except bricks
dropping from walls with tiny ceiling tiles. Grass snakes
wind around the weeds among foundation cracks.
Temples with recombinant winged hermetic dragons,
bearded men with wings and claws or serpent’s tails.
Here, the deity doesn’t have a graven image other than
the drop of masonry, the iron bars that made
a holding-pen for the unruliest of soldier-sailors.
You’d almost think they did the damage,
impossible children, or whirlwinds.
How quickly ruins become shrines, the bolts bent.
And what was costly to demolish slowly sunk.
Local deities expose the weakness of their self-image,
layered and mortared and always cracking,
but the people wind around the erosion and picnic
and the lighter fluid floats.
With the old names fallen away, they’ll find new ones in the grass.