His doves moulting, silks frayed, squeaky hinge
on the secret wall behind which rabbits huddle,
the invisible curtain covered with lint—
he is still the magician, wondrously at home,
every flaw erased by the footlights.
 
In the high school auditorium this act is real.
A girl in the front row thinks he's looking at me,
and volunteers the first time he asks.
A spotlight obliterates her past
as she climbs in a steamer trunk, blindfolded.
 
He enters a second trunk, grinning, hands high, 
then vanishes just as the vanishing girl screams.
His painfully happy assistant arrives from the wings, 
tips forward the two now empty trunks 
as the curtains begin to converge.
 
The girl wakes in a motel by his side, 
sees ice cubes melted in a plastic bucket, 
a scattering of feather flowers, paper snakes, 
and strange lumps behind the drapes.
She sees two glasses in their pure wax wrappers.
 
He climbs over her on the bed,
still in his tuxedo, asking with bored eyes
we've never met before, have we?
This has not been prearranged? And she feels 
her scream halt in a smile so wide it hurts.

An orange dumpster the size
of a small house, parked near
the newly wrecked old gym, overbrims
with a jagged jumble of bricks
and shattered glass, rebar, strips
of ripped-up shingles, concrete
chunks, oddly twisted lengths
of rusty raingutter, pipes 
blackened and bent, asphalt lumps,
and the rare gleam of marble.
 
Statewide Razing: their stark logo
a dropped pebble rippling out
across my mind: buildings 
all over the state disappearing,
a whole industry devoted to 
unmanufacture, taking down every 
apartment house, library, school, 
and factory in time—clouds of dust 
unsettled as ghosts, wrecking ball 
never still, dump truck after truck 
hauling it all into memory.
 
It's nothing but necessary, this
passagework of compost and decay,
these dozers and cranes
the burying beetles and carrion crows
of our outleafing towns,
unending turnover of failure
and success alike, leaves dropping
to September ground, then rising
root to twig in due season,
raising and razing the night
and day of our brief season.