I hike once more this morning, summer easing into fall,
down the path, across the dunes,
then right, the long way around
along the shore
imagining
I follow your footsteps
though forty years of sprawl has altered the landscape
beyond any route
I can map
out of your words—
There are more
straight lines, more blocks and boxes
than you would have
encountered,
condos profuse now
as gulls
on both inlet and ocean side,
but nature
still seems to prefer
the curve, to insist
on meandering
as your mirroring mind did,
as mine does now,
back to your poem, which I have been reading
each morning, hoping
it will reveal
something
about this place. And poetry.
The mutual geographies
we have explored.
Most afternoons I head to the beach,
kick off my flip-flops and
plunge
into the waves
regardless of weather
determined
to get my fill of ocean while I can.
But
today’s crisp air prompted me
to venture
across both bridges, past the bored gaze
of the toll taker,
the drivers who each took
a second to return my wave,
the fishermen
who curiously eye my lack
of rod and reel—
which would at least give me a reason for being
out this far
they could understand.
But I amble
without purpose.
No direction. No goal.
Destination
being anywhere
I end up.
Could a life be lived as aimlessly?—
each day a disorder
of passing
hours
haphazard as the welter
washed up on this shore?
And would that be to savor or squander?
To accept the becoming thought, you wrote
after your own walk,
but how to do so when the mundane
muddies every eddy
beyond meaning
And how to keep life
when one’s own species
seems to choose death over
and over?
Marsh grass sways
susurrus
in the steady breeze,
as the seasonal swarm
of starlings
(that hasn’t changed)
wing
their pretty havoc across a cloudless sky,
a convergence of chaos
ordered
in a mass of motion.
In one pond, I startle two snowy egrets,
in another
a great blue heron startles me
as does the woman
a little further on
solitary
as I am, except
for a cell phone,
strange shell
she cradles to her ear.
I have tallied up my sightings
of gulls, terns, sanderlings, plovers
a few others I searched
though the Field Guide for,
attempting
to name them
into a kind of knowledge—
an ordering
of a multitude of disorder,
accounting
beyond counting
which you came to
reject—or perhaps
just give up on, as I finally do
content to just watch
all those birds
winging it
as I walk
