At what depth does their dull orange disappear?

I rowed out to where I know the water’s deep,

and in my rowboat: a cargo

of bricks, fifty balanced

across the stern, just so.

At the bottom of this reservoir

was a town. Two towns, in truth.

Its people were paid an honest price

to leave, but no question: they had to move.

I anchor my boat forty feet above

what was once a pasture.

I take a brick from port first

and hold it by its upper-right corner

and dip its lower-left corner into the water

before I let it slip my fingers.

The next one I take from starboard,

but drop from port, and so forth and on.

It’s the sinistra hand that does the work.

I never counted two seconds before one was gone

from touch, and sound, and sight. They sink until they stop

on now drowned and grassless land.

Why do I want to leave a small scattering

of man-made triangular stones

at the bottom of this no-bones

(the cemetery relocated)

body of water? In darkness, who does not love

the faint, hard, orange glow

of building bricks?

None of us go there anymore.

It’s a defunct resort

town in winter. The rust-colored sea’s thick waves roll over

sideways, slowly. The boardwalk collapsed

and was hacked into fist-sized chunks—to sell

as pieces of The True Boardwalk, reliquarilly.

The Old Hotel, after the termites ate their fill,

became (and turned the same color as) the potbelly

of dirt on a grave. Still pink, the pink

of a pint of blood in five gallons of water,

the cotton candy wagon’s cotton candy maker spins

not a skein, not an airy thread.

That man with eight-foot stiff-kneed legs is gone, his hat now

a blacked-out lighthouse

at the end of the stubby shorebreak.

A whole generation, or two, came here

in the years between the wars.

It was as if certain things never happened.

The whole island is an under-lit room.

You’re in it, now, we’re all in it now,

and an eight-foot bucksaw

leans, more than a little bowed, cocked, taut

against a wall.