More often and for periods as long
as… oh, the life of an eraser, say,
a bar of hotel soap, I’ve used up nights
in search of why I use up nights this way—
that is, compiling reasons for not
sneaking out on Winthrop’s pond and bouncing
on the rotten ice til I fall through. Or
staging it so my survivors after voicing
private doubts would satisfy themselves
that that’s indeed all he was doing on
the back porch in the dark—tinkering with
the trigger pull. But someone downstate
tried that and the coroner saw through it, so
another nightbrowse, this one on the man
who built a wobbly tower in memory of
a daughter who, according to the sign,
was kidnapped by the Communists, but who,
according to the cashier at the local market,
never was. To raise a homely tower to
your lunacy—a promontory high
enough to let you catch a glance of sunlight
from a made-up someone’s hair—
I have debris and time, can weld and god
knows hammer, rivet, solder, drill and splice,
am agile, unafraid of heights, and tell me
that there wouldn’t be a meter to its ribs,
a symmetry. Why? is the worst that would
be said, and you’d know all the while why.