Stolen \ Posting the DANGER Signs At Raven's Gulch

Alan:  When something’s taken from us, how do we react?  Maybe if we see the smaller thefts as a training...

Stolen

I came back to find the generator

          stolen

or rather to see

                           the blue tarp

                   blown against bushes

and the yellow cord

          with its heavy plug

dangling

                           from the outside wall

Easy to guess what happened.

Two men, young, strong, quick

                     could muscle it without trace

(except for the blotch

          of spilled diesel, candy

                             wrapper tossed carelessly aside)

across frozen ground, dead grass, gravel

          and lift it or slide it up planks

                             into their pickup

                      and be gone

They’ll sell it for scrap or pawn it

             for drugs or maybe to pay off Christmas

                               or even (I can hope) keep it

if they get it running

                     after years of no use.

We live in a world of stolen.  Long ago

              when this was just a summer place

                               uninsulated frame camp

                          cobbled from reject lumber

you arrived in the dark

             after the slow hard trip from Boston

                                to light the gas lamp

                                                 heard hissing

             jerked the match away

                                from the cut line in time

Hap McDaniel hired a crew once

             to clear alders at the edge of the next-door field

went home for lunch

             returned to find them driving away with his tools –

guys he was paying.  Hap’s long gone

                        but forty years on we remember

We remember too the story

             of the man who found his front door missing

was sure he knew who took it

                             went to get it back, was asked in, was talking

looked up, noticed a door-shaped bulge

              in the just-papered-over ceiling 

When a thief took every bit 

                               of Ryokan’s so-very-little

he grieved he could not offer him the moon

            shining through the hut’s open window.

For myself, I only wish 

                               along with the generator

I could give to these

            whose need can never be satisfied

a share of the happiness I feel now

            seeing it gone

Nancy: When the icy sea is yet warmer than the frigid air and the air icier than the frozen ground and your own breath is the loudest sound, this is a lonely planet and a cold star.

Posting The DANGER Signs At Raven’s Gulch

Zero degrees.

Wind cuts across the cobble beach

but the trail goes up, into trees.

Not much talking,

climbing; wondering what animal,

or was it the earth itself,

breathed out these white feathers beside the trail?

Height of land.  Now the trail

pitches down.

“STOP,” the signs say, “DANGER.”

This is what we came to do.

And in the cleft,

only the sea, smoking,

smoking.  No ravens.

Except for the hammer, driving nails,

no sound.

The sky,

receiving sea smoke,

makes clouds.

Note: The poem refers to degrees Fahrenheit.  0º Fahrenheit is roughly -18º Celsius.