Poems in Nature & Seasons

The water pulls back like a bedsheet
and leaves its small cargo:
a whelk shell the color of weak tea,
kelp collapsed in wet brown commas,
one child's flip flop, size six, no child.

My father taught me to read these leavings,
how the tide writes and unwrites the same page
twice a day, patient as a monk
copying what he already knows.

He is three winters gone now.
I stand where the ferry groans against the pilings
and the gulls argue over a crab claw.
The cold comes up through my boots
the way it always did, honest and slow.

Somewhere out past the shipping lane
a freighter slides toward Asia,
its wake a long white sentence
no one will ever finish.

I pick up a stone with a hole worn through it.
Good luck, he would have said.
I put it in my coat and don't look back
at the water giving all its secrets away
and taking them back, and giving them,
and taking them back.

The morning after the storm
the beach is a rummage sale
of kelp and bottle caps,
a single blue flip flop,
one crab shell small as a thumbnail
the color of a bruise healing.

My father used to walk this stretch
with a bucket, picking up what the water
did not want. He said the sea
gives back everything eventually,
just never in the shape you lent it.

I kneel in the wet sand.
The tide line is a sentence
written and rewritten,
and I am learning to read it
slowly, without asking
for the meaning to hold still.

A gull argues with the wind.
The rain comes back,
soft at first, then serious,
and I let it soak my coat
the way he would have,
standing here, saying nothing,
letting the weather do the talking.

The eelgrass leans one way, then the other,
as if deciding whether to stay.
My boots sink an inch into the grey mud,
and the harbor keeps its small secrets:
a hinge of crab shell, a bottle cap gone green,
the ribbed back of a mussel bed
still holding yesterday's rain.

You would have liked it here, I think,
though I always say that at low tide,
when the water pulls back like a sheet
and shows what it was covering.
The herons work the shallows without apology.
The wind smells of iron and kelp.

Somewhere out past the breakwater
the ferries keep their schedules,
ordinary and certain as clocks.
I pocket a stone the color of dishwater
and walk back toward the lot,
where the pines shake off their wet
and the sky gets on with the business
of going grey, then greyer,
then quietly, finally, dark.

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.