Poem for Tuesday and Idylwood Park

Private Beach
By Jane Kenyon

It is always the dispossessed—
someone driving a huge rusted Dodge
that’s burning oil, and must cost
twenty-five dollars to fill.

Today before seven I saw, through
the morning fog, his car leave the road,
turning into the field. It must be
his day off, I thought, or he’s out
of work and drinking, or getting stoned.
Or maybe as much as anything
he wanted to see
where the lane through the hay goes.

It goes to the bluff overlooking
the lake, where we’ve cleared
brush, swept the slippery oak
leaves from the path, and tried to destroy
the poison ivy that runs
over the scrubby, sandy knolls.

Sometimes in the evening I’ll hear
gunshots or firecrackers. Later a car
needing a new muffler backs out
to the road, headlights withdrawing
from the lowest branches of the pines.

Next day I find beer cans, crushed;
sometimes a few fish too small
to bother cleaning and left
on the moss to die; or the leaking
latex trace of outdoor love....
Once I found the canvas sling chairs
broken up and burned.

Whoever laid the fire gathered stones
to contain it, like a boy pursuing
a merit badge, who has a dream of work,
and proper reward for work.

-------- 

Tuesday was, by any standards, a gorgeous day -- good air quality, temperatures in the low 70s, partially cloudy with a nice breeze. It's the first time we've walked to the beach in days when it really felt great to be outdoors, and we got to have the windows open all day. My Voyager group had two people away but we watched the series finale of Picard, which I loved. There are things I could gripe about plot-wise, but it's great fun to see the whole TNG cast together, and I appreciate that, in a Borg story, Seven of Nine used only her human skills! 

Then we watched the first two episodes of Ahsoka, which I also loved, though I never managed to finish The Clone Wars -- we are going to work on that! Strangely, I thought the show spent a lot of energy making Sabine the most compelling character...well, often the apprentices are more creative than the masters, who get bogged down in citing how Jedi do things. I love that the show centers on four women, and of course there's a wise-ass droid, and they're all very well cast and have nice chemistry. It's been a while since I posted pics from Idylwood beach, so here: