Foamhenge by FM Stringer

Foamhenge

“Come one, come all to the marvelous Foamhenge! Foamhenge is our famous full-size Stonehenge replica made entirely of styrofoam!”

Summer 2012—

Was it your turn behind the wheel
when we pulled off the highway
at Natural Bridge, Virginia,
to stretch our legs, snap a photo,
or was it mine? Two weeks
in an ‘03 Jetta in an oil slick
of an August, finding out how much
of the long country we could see
before the apocalypse—It must have been
yours. I loved you then. Did I
tell you so as you leaned into the dash
and peered over your knockoff Ray-
Bans, as though to better see the road
turn primitive? O to be a fly
splattered to that windshield. To live
in this honeyed account. The dirt parking lot
staining our sneakers copper. The path
uphill, flanked by pines. These things
don’t last. An unseasonable storm
darkened a corner of sky, hurrying us.
Miles away, the ocean licked
an archipelago higher
than it ever had before. Up close:
The stones’ gray latex paint, weathered
in broad patches. The white
styrene pellets underneath, stuck
mid-spill. A ruin of a monument
to a ruin of a monument,
nevertheless, in its way,
spellbinding. Perhaps in part due
to the figure on the grassy fringe, a life-
size Merlin, also showing wear, posed
reaching to summon lightning, or to lift
the megalithic stones himself by magic.
His face, according to a sign nearby, cast
from a mold of a friend’s, a death mask.
One day, something’s here. The next—

In four years it would all come down,
migrate 170 miles northeast, the pieces
repaired, repainted, and re-placed
to align with the Summer solstice,
like its inspiration in England—
a temple, observatory, or tomb.
We didn’t know that then. And I
didn’t know that it would be, for us,
the last stop, the end of the road.
But from the parking lot, looking up
the hill, facing the sun and
the standing stones, from that distance
I could almost see it perfectly:
the persistence of it, thereness—
its character a holiness,
set among the dead—its having been
conceived, quarried, heaved—
its being of the same blue earth that was
nearing an ending all around us.

*

FM Stringer’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in The Penn Review, North American Review, West Trade Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and dogs.