Ruin

Come one day to doors the dune had carried,

We left our girls to tend that lapse of house

And curved back with the push-ball in the truck

To find them whispering, in the dizzying air

By stairs that led up nowhere to the sky,

How just had fallen to pieces at a touch

The newel-post: was this dragon country?

Shyness was in the air, the feel of treasure,

And someone said we should go back for spades;

But drawing a line across that dragon's back,

We roughed and scuffed those coiling wastes till noon

Quickened again our sense of gold somewhere-

The cool of the push-ball shading a long meal.

For though our leisure soon drew from the sun's

Immense despotic gesture of happiness

An intimation that, behind the dunes,

Where the tracks our coming made were already gone

Other ventures too might pass as well-

Love-making ran only a bare slip-hold

Over a more dazzling silence there.

Surely where sunken planks and toppled pillars

And bed-posts in the sand like shark-fins made it

Nip and tuck for stairs that rode the sand,

Wouldn't plates and cups have lodged so deep

The pressing dark by now had turned them gold-

Right underfoot, perhaps, and easy to find?

Shiftings rising through our legs as we played

Vanished, shivers of cold, in the heated air.

And once when our girls got up from the glitter

Of combs and bottles between their spraddled legs,

Sprang up breathless slopes, raced down again,

And lauded ruin with their darling cries-

As if a laughter stirred in giant ripples

Every drift shook out like cockle-shells

The small scoured curlycues of picture-frames.

Old hornet-nests, though-that was all we found

For all we looked where violet shadows pointed

Faintly from sticks of chairs worn thin and white

Toward cupboards husked and pale and pored with noon.

Though every smashed thing seemed to give off sparks

Inside its spreading whiteness on the wind,

And, hotter than sky's own, we sent our ball

Plunging from crests to find for us what we-

Flying before its crush-struck safe to pieces

Or stalked for ours through barely-wriggled broom,

Before we knew those slips and slides were gone

That trickled like gold upward through our strength.

Hard as we played against its regardlessness-

And even after, hearing their far-off songs,

We got the girls to join us in likely spots

Where treachery hid everywhere under the sedge

And, teamed against them, pushed around some more

Until, examining their legs, they quit-

That desolation sported but as we sported

And when we stopped stopped its playing too.

Still, no one would have called our hopes a dream

And, hoisting the ball in the pick-up, we collapsed

Only to talk the more of, some day, digging

And, really, to gather strength for a new try.

For suddenly striking away we ran in circles

Through still new neighborhoods of aching guile

Where cupolas burned and lilted as if to flee.

But whether we leaped and shouted-or staggered dazed-

Before we streamed again down golden depths,

Not one blazing bank that bore our sport

Answered the toil and spoil we had in mind.

Even in gullies whose infectious aura

Of quivering invitation made us sweat,

Ruin was vain by then and not surprised-

Almost as vain as we were in our cunning

That seemed only to near the heart of day.

Then one of them said-when we came back where the girls

Like amulets fallen from a topaz noon

Drowsed in the ruddy light, their heads thrown back,

Before they waked and flung themselves upon us

As once more we dropped down in a sard heap-

"Look, there's the dragon now," and pointed where

A stretch of sky, scaled with stars, fondly

Lowered to us a sleepless golden eye.

And just like that-we knew we weren't overwhelmed

Half enough ever to come there again.

Whatever dread might reach for us the full

One pits his strength against to be devoured by

Would hardly happen in those sandpiles, True,

Our hearts were more than filled with love and pleasure

So sweet to play were the darting scary. games

Our girls invented in vales of floating dusk.

But since the dragon that neared as we stood ready

Either to make or break till we scattered laughing

Or rolled, delirious, where our feet were buried

Was none we had to slay or be afraid of,

Even those riches chilled to the mere fun

(Though we might never have such gold again)

Of wandering windrows where anything may emerge,

But nothing quite comes to pass-in the fabulous way

As big a ball as the world goes smashing by.