Mending Kit (poem)

                                      --Provincetown, 2001

The package, palm fit, its binding skeins
of thread, its prick of needled light,
tools made neat for an alchemist's sigh:
there is nothing more real than nothing.

And here, ocean birds scream to sing
some call, their call, to the whippet wind,
to the rushing tides:  and nature pins
its drooping hem with this diurnal
darning of her slow ebb and return,
the binding thread, the shoreline's rim.

We walk down the dazzled light
where waters lave this stone's slow turning.