Today the pool is leafy. A newspaper tents and sprawls.
The sky remains medium gray. A bee, an ant,
and a plastic spoon whirl in the jet.
People get trapped in trees, rocks, and bottles.
They have liver damage, melancholia, and tooth decay.

A bulldozer stacks the old mall parking lot
into a man’s wrinkled brow, or a talus of scales
fallen from a super-size snake. Atop a sand-pile sphinx,
a mockingbird sings a rusty song.

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The idea for this poem came from lounging around the pool when it was too cool to swim and then taking a walk to where an older mall was being redone. I've always enjoyed construction sites because of their sculptor-like use of raw materials and their embodiment of the destruction/creation process.