Veronica Beatrice Walton
Pastoral with Lighthouse

When I was younger, my late grandparents had a house near enough to the ocean that the sky looked at once complete and incomplete. Their screened-in porch, white as an old shell, faced a neighborly flock of geese. The horizon and grass, in mingling hues, greened forth under a curtain of decanting mist.

I can see you: you are a shape moving towards me across the lawn. It is hard to tell if you are moving towards or away from the sea; I have never had a sure sense of direction, only my hands’ nascent topographies. Still, you were never there, never in any direction at all. You are looking at me like an alien on a distant planet wondering if there is also life. My hands, history’s telescope, wound up in prophecy.

Today, I am thinking of the things that unravel in death. My grandmother calls me in for dinner. For a moment, my father’s eyes look green. The ocean stirs and settles like a basement I’ll never sleep in.

The past is a distant searchlight.

*

Pastoral with Mask(ing)

In my palm, this clover looks
like the eye of a child.

My student said yesterday
that he wished his eyes were

green. The grass in the park
has been mowed, refined --

churned above itself. Yet it

is still grass, though detached
like how bodies detach from

years. Children scream like far-
off raptors. My eyes, green with

a growth of brown: a recollection of
leaves, soil, roots. A frenzied origin.

The underside of the woods. A
wish to become something else.

I, middleman. I, not quite anything.
The sky holds the trees erect like

masks, the motile

light glorying endlessly between. I
face the sun on my stomach, fingers

picking at a clowder of musts.