When I was small I played with plastic army men. We had a lawn that was mostly clovers and dandelions and half-buried sweetgum seeds, and so my mom didn’t mind much at all when I dug the place up to make earthworks, trenches and berms and twig cheval de frise. I remember how the clay soil dried on my hands and cracked in my creases. I didn’t know many words back then. There were earthworms and pillbugs and white grubs with sinister orange faces. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so I set everything up all by myself. I had some cannons with rickety wheels and cavalrymen on flat brown horses. And really I wasn’t playing, just trying to make the scene look right. Shape and relation and fitting in concern me still. I haven’t solved anything since then. I turn a quick orbit around a coldness that I’ll sink into someday, because it’s true that nothing lasts. My little fingers would get numb from scraping, but summer storms turned everything back to mud.