WEBVTT

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And this.

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This is a strange poem.

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It's called A Walk.

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It starts out quite
realistically,

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as long as you don't imagine
or wonder too long, why

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the person in the poem would
be doing what he's doing,

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quite realistically.

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It's 3:00 in the
morning in February.

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And he starts out
walking from the Cape Cod

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Lighthouse, all the way
along the length of Cape Cod.

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But then, things get stranger.

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The seasons change.

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And it becomes spring,
and it becomes summer,

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and he's still walking.

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He seems to be relentless
in his pursuit of something

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that he hopes to
find by walking.

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The poem is called A Walk.

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February on the narrow beach.

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3:00 AM.

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I set out South.

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Cape Cod light on its
crumbling cliff above me

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turns its wand of
light so steadily it

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might be tolling a half life.

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It might be the second
hand of a schoolroom clock.

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A kind of blind radar.

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These bluffs,
deposited by glaciers,

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are giving themselves away
to the beaches down the line.

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Three feet of coastline a year.

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I follow them South
with my own slow pace.

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Ahead, my grandfather died in a
boat, and my father found him,

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and here I come.

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If I cleave to the
base of the berm,

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the offshore wind swirls
grit just over my head,

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and the backwash rakes it away.

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If I keep going South, toward my
grandfather's house in Chatham,

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and beyond, the Longshore
current grinds the sand finer

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the farther I go.

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It spreads it wider.

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And the beaches
sift inland as far

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as they can go before beach
grass laces them down for now.

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It gets to be spring.

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I keep walking.

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It gets to be summer.

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Families lull.

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Now the waves are small.

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They keep their swash
marks close to home.

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A little inland from the
spurge and sea rockets,

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my tan sons kick a soccer
ball North against grains

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that may once have been
compacted to sandstone then

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broken back to grains.

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Bumbling.

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And driven.

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And free again.

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Shrinking.

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Along the broadening edge.

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