Displace

I haven’t lived there for thirty-one years
but my unicorn decal shines in the bedroom window.

Through the floor we felt the deep vibration of the central air unit
that hunkered beside the house.

Hollow doors, drywall, thick patterned drapes,
scratches on the records, and the sheen of new linoleum.

Before me now – a rowboat named Patience, and a ruby drink
on the railing against the fog at dusk.

Here the cicadas in the nearby beech forest sing
up into the bare curves of the sand dunes.

A red fox slips through the marsh grasses
as the tide pulls the sea slowly off the breakwater.

I am teaching myself to identify birds
by the sound of their wings.

I am transposing this landscape
with the one I was born into.

A secular way of praying:
flock of cormorants gliding through the mist.