They Will Be Building

This weird glimmer of Spring,
and a wide horizon at the oddest times:
the turn of a concrete stairway, a window
from the inmost city, shows the hills
draggling south from Mt Hood,
blueberry-colored, cut clean against the sky.

We take to the road, and the dust
backs away, slowly miming "I have nothing
to do with it!" with ghostly hands
of dispersing motes: they are still waving --
goodbye? -- as we disappear.

I don't know if you remember
roasting hot dogs at the headwaters
of the Missouri: it was a long time ago
and the winter suns have not been kind since then.

Still the hammer strikes the concrete,
shrill and hard and shrill and hard again:
they will be building, though they don't know why.