And this.
This is a strange poem.
It's called A Walk.
It starts out quite realistically,
as long as you don't imagine or wonder too long, why
the person in the poem would be doing what he's doing,
quite realistically.
It's 3:00 in the morning in February.
And he starts out walking from the Cape Cod
Lighthouse, all the way along the length of Cape Cod.
But then, things get stranger.
The seasons change.
And it becomes spring, and it becomes summer,
and he's still walking.
He seems to be relentless in his pursuit of something
that he hopes to find by walking.
The poem is called A Walk.
February on the narrow beach.
3:00 AM.
I set out South.
Cape Cod light on its crumbling cliff above me
turns its wand of light so steadily it
might be tolling a half life.
It might be the second hand of a schoolroom clock.
A kind of blind radar.
These bluffs, deposited by glaciers,
are giving themselves away to the beaches down the line.
Three feet of coastline a year.
I follow them South with my own slow pace.
Ahead, my grandfather died in a boat, and my father found him,
and here I come.
If I cleave to the base of the berm,
the offshore wind swirls grit just over my head,
and the backwash rakes it away.
If I keep going South, toward my grandfather's house in Chatham,
and beyond, the Longshore current grinds the sand finer
the farther I go.
It spreads it wider.
And the beaches sift inland as far
as they can go before beach grass laces them down for now.
It gets to be spring.
I keep walking.
It gets to be summer.
Families lull.
Now the waves are small.
They keep their swash marks close to home.
A little inland from the spurge and sea rockets,
my tan sons kick a soccer ball North against grains
that may once have been compacted to sandstone then
broken back to grains.
Bumbling.
And driven.
And free again.
Shrinking.
Along the broadening edge.