Featured Poem: Wellfleet

THE PAST IS KINDLING.
We are plagiarists of the unwritten
And the present keeps hanging around
Like a girl I owe money to.

The October beaches are quiet
Without you. This morning drifts
Of sand hissed along the shore
Like mist, the wind feeling out its own shape,
And I thought about the words
I would use to re-create it for you
Someday.

We are only ever blueprints for shadows.
The crab-shack woman shyly dabs
At a pimple—kids jostle for position
At the face-paint stand—geese chevron across
The sky—one by one these things are gone
Or maybe I am gone from them.

I miss rubbing the sand
From your calves
While you read about some celebrity
Heartbreak or other, those moments
When you were barely aware of me at all.

You said I fall in love like someone
Trying to uninvent the wheel
But I went and did it anyway.
I’m doing it still.
I took on the hours and days
Of this world because it was the only place
That you were possible
And when it casts me off
My last thoughts will be for you
Alone and it matters not at all
If you are there to hear them.

Stars wait unseen for the sky to fall
Away. Up and down the stippled coast
The darkened houses shelter our absences
From the contingencies of night—this night
Into which I am writing a blue dawn
Of shadowed sands, the new light
Rediscovering the waves and our faces
Salt-streaked and painted, starred white and gold
With the careless grace of children.