cape poem 1

Avoiding the glare, and sting of sunscreen,

My eyes flow to the cattails dancing in the afternoon,

Wind-whipped, sun shorn

Protruding from the muddy bank.

We are at 55 knots in a turtle shell of fiber glass.
My mother sings “eili, eili”

And her voice is at once the wonder of the moment

And the moment itself, the way several days ago

I stood staring down the beginning of a storm,

Chest heaving with oxygen and skin slick

With sweat becoming rain,

Invigorated by life and surprised by how close I felt

To being gone. Mary is gone, the one

We used to fool with mints behind our teeth and

Beer cans below the gas pedal. Her son is showing

His teeth, has a new haircut,

Asks us to tell stories about her

Though the priest tells the same one over and over

As if to say “don’t worry. She isn’t gone.”

But she is. Tim knows it,

Tears behind his tongue and the stink of last nights drinking

Resting its legs just below a $4 spray of cologne.

And today the spray salts my wounds and floods my heart.

We whoop and shout. When we find land, we stream across

The hot sand as if running across water, as if the things

We are running towards or away from are right there,

Are underneath and ready to swallow us whole like the whale.

It would not be so bad.