Jeannette de Beauvoir

THE MEASURE OF WEALTH

Wealthy property owners in my seaside
town all love how quaint the houses are—
then tear them down to make instead
mansions with glass walls facing the sea.
There is always construction here.

I pass a massive home being built and look
at the vehicles parked alongside—the builders,
the electricians, the plumbers. I know their
homes are nothing like these. They install
luxurious palaces and go home instead to modest

dwellings in towns that do not face the sea.
I wonder whether they begrudge their customers’
homes, their customers’ money, their customers’
leisure. But then I think about what I do, put
words to paper, ephemeral, soon forgotten;

when they feel a need for meaning, they can drive
past these mansions, inhabited only a few weeks a year,
or rented by the week to even wealthier visitors—they
can drive past, and say in their hearts,

I made that.

Jeannette de Beauvoir is a novelist who happened to write a poem and fell in love with the genre. She lives and works at Land’s End—Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the Emerson Review, the Looking Glass Review, Avalon Literary Review, the Blue Collar Review, On Gaia, the Sheepshead Review, Grande Dame Literary, The Raven’s Perch, the Adirondack Review, Perception, and the New England Review, among others; she was featured in WCAI’s Poetry Sunday, and is the recipient of the Mary Ballard Chapbook Prize and the Outermost Poetry Contest national award. More at jeannettedebeauvoir.com