Collaborative Verses

The clock in the hall coughs once and forgets
what it meant to say. I have learned to keep
your coat on its hook, to let the rain
write its slow will across the glass
and not answer.

Grief is not the flood. It is the drip
behind the plaster, the copper coin
gone green in the pocket of a Sunday suit,
the hinge that complains when the wind
tries the gate. Small accounts. I settle them
each night with a candle stub and a thumb
worn smooth from counting.

You would have laughed—
that laugh like a dropped key—
to see me argue with the kettle,
to hear me bargain with the frost
that feathers the sill. The kettle wins.

In the cemetery the iron angels
keep their rust, their chipped wings,
their patience. They do not offer
consolation. They only stand,
as I stand, in the long grass,
listening for a footstep
that knows the way home
and takes it.

The tide pulls back like a breath held too long,
leaving the harbor floor exposed—
a scab of barnacled rock, a boot sole,
a length of chain gone orange with salt.
My father's rowboat leans into the mud
as if listening for something underneath.

We come down here this time of year
to read what the water wrote and erased.
Kelp curls like burnt paper. A crab shell
cups a little gray rain. The air smells
of cold copper and diesel, of things
that keep working even after they stop.

He doesn't say much anymore. His hands
find the same rope, the same knot,
as though his fingers remember a season
the rest of him has let go. The light
goes thin and yellow, a coin worn smooth.
We stand where the eelgrass leans one way,
then another, agreeing with the wind.

Up on the bluff the pines hold their rain
like a debt they'll never pay off.
Somewhere a gull complains at nothing.
The water is coming back—slow, patient,
lifting the boat, unburying the stones.
It always comes back. That's the whole
of it. That, and the cold on our lips,
and the long walk up the hill to the car.