Care in destruction is a form of self-deception

and fury is blind
or even the precision destruction
of a sand castle

there is no such thing as
a precision bomb

the formal finitude of made things overcomes
our respect for what we have made

often that our desire to destroy is
The dark side of the news he brought.

Unwilling or unable to be
the curator
of his creation, the boy swiftly

returned it to its elements,
that is, to
its pure potential

ready to be used again
they were
were internalized

used in making the castle
Once the skills

or, better, learning
was a mode of memorization,
as if what he had been practicing

returning the power of the form back to
himself, the boy seemed
to be,

and using all his physical
might to do so,
By destroying the mere thing

acquire an interiority in being
a memory alone, but could not
realize an interior

Did this object that implied,
one he felt could be replaced

easily? Was his castle
a work of craft

rather than art, we cannot
give value to our making,

always present as the potential
for unmaking, or at least

we have to making, for
without the freedom of reversibility

enacted in unmaking,
we have to making,

that boy has represented
for me a certain relation
Since then

and he skipped off to wherever he was going next
he grinned (to himself, to me, I couldn't tell)

But the boy was delighted
"the lone and level sands stretch far away"

"Ozymandias," I thought of the end
of Shelley's
"come to grief," as we say, Startled,

feeling that something beautiful had
then not distinguishable at all,

barely distinguishable from the sand
surrounding them as the castle's sandy walls and towers

his arms and legs flailing like a gritty

whirligig, he kicked with all his might,

Reaching it

turned again, and raced back to his castle,

stopped, ran back a few yards, turned,

smacked his hands together,

then he stood

and still the boy worked on,
smaller children began to whine for their supper,

boney driftwood into emptied buckets
and spilled the day's find of shells and

Sunbathers shook out their towels.
darker than the sky,
streaked the horizon,

then darker blue
Meanwhile strips of red, orange

tomorrow there it would be
or a patrolling jeep wheeled over it, or a pair

of lovers stumbled across it, and unless
in the dark a drunk,

his castle would be safe,
even as the tide came in—

He had chosen his site carefully
as well—revisions made with

the tips of his fingers, the point of minor
additions and deletions
were thrown aside,

for his work had reached
His blunter instruments, shovels and buckets,

where the windows would be
indentations carved

by a spoon's edge to show,
turrets, moats, interior walls,

who was building an elaborate sand castle,
maybe eight, maybe nine
years old, I could catch sight of a boy, beyond

the periphery of its oblong shadow,
I was reading under a beach umbrella and

but one late summer afternoon
which coast, or which sea,

I don't remember where.