I actually may be too old to still be writing poems

"We should be a statue somewhere"
I said, long ago, at the beginning,
in the year of the kiss
when my eyes saw so quickly
that the wave of a hand
seemed as slow as moss swallowing stone.
Now I see that a couple is an outpost,
a crop of purple between the rocks,
a bloom beneath the heat,
bright against the sandy hills,
and we are no monument
but quick shimmering things,
tattered, clinging to the side of the slope.

***

At the end of each day we gather the hours
emptied and stacked like cardboard boxes under the sink
and tear them up and fold them into the bricks
of the walls we are building.
Rooms have sprung up around us where before there was only grass, sky.
A thicket of stone.
At night I walk the corridors.
Whether I am keeping watch or just keeping busy
is hard to say.
Sometimes I think we are under siege
but then it is only the rain, a bird that is lost and calling out, a cloud
sliced open by the sun.

And besides it is a beautiful day out.