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1. In the Gravel Pit, Westside

   I hack down two feet into the clotted limestone,
   build caverns within the soil where roots can spread,
   plunge downward, anchoring so strongly they can
   winter over. Use plants that have moved from place
   to place, heredity known, like some family tree, city
   to town to countryside, then roadside, like the cactus
   bed and yucca, the kniphofia’s red cones. This gravel
   bed is a reclamation from when the country busses
   filled the lot, buckets and buckets of chat and rock
   hauled to the driveway, and bowl shapes created
   to fill with soil and dryland plantings, ubiquitous
   daylilies on the deadshelf at the supermarket for
   a dollar. Houses are built but homes are a process
   and so too these plants adapt, morph over time:
   the everlastings and sedums, the phlox and iris,
   the roadside verbena, the late fall goldenrods.
   More a shack in the woods than a mansion when
   viewed by the unknowing, but each returning
   plant is a small victory, a salvaged timber.

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2. Rectangular building blocks,
   yellow, red, blue, green,
   squares and pillars, some rounded out
   just enough to provide windows
   or archways for the houses, the garages
   that I built with my son
   for all his Hot Wheels, his vroom-vrooms.
   Then came the thousands of Legos
   that let one build any/everything,
   endless hours of building, building.
   I never minded sitting on the floor with kids/grandkids
   building what may or may not work out as planned.
   It was the sitting, the trying,
   sharing ideas, comprising with two or three or five-year-olds,
   trading blocks or letting them tear down
   my structure to create their own.
   I knew it was not the buildings that were important
   but the builders learning to build.

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