Every restaurant boarded up in softwood,
bars strung with tipsy blinkers, smudgefires
against the dusk-
like day: who could have imagined the light
toppling down, song you can see
over all? Or this salt breeze,
vital and teary as a drunken wake.
The kite store’s ringed with stunted Christmas
trees like pathetic closed umbrellas.
This is the year we’ll trim with shells.
The man who sells them tells us tales
of smuggling, of price wars over apple coral,
fluted clams. His hair branches and his skin
hardens as he speaks: part baobab, part pirate.
His shells—little bandana prints, green turbans—
are lovely, ‘‘droll’” might be the word,
but tropical, not from Cape Cod.
It was ten years ago this season
my father died, leaving me odd
wisdoms concerning clip joints,
gypsies, toeroom, elocution,
and traveling light. I was 20,
up to my elbows in developer,
acid, fixative: a microfilm
technician with few discernible skills.
What would he have made of this off-season
resort? Though he never lived to see it
I can hear him say “Don’t worry,
Al, if the poetry don’t go
Pll buy you your own beauty shop.”
Yes, with sickly pink
smells, well-thumbed back issues
of Hairdo and a 3-D religious picture
that flickered between Mary and Jesus,
in tricky light revealing
the Blessed Mother with a beard.
He liked scenery, Kay Frances
movies, and the fights. I guess,
like you, I never really knew him.
On the last visit I ambled to his room
with my dignified mini hiked up
in the back, flashing
unintentional ass to the joyous
orderlies. Befuddled by dripping
liquids, screens yielding twitchy lights,
he said “What are we doing
in this car wash?”’ Then he thought he remembered
a long ago close call, when a canvas-topped jalopy
broke down in a Saratoga storm.
His hands froze first, then his flesh turned
dense as a snowman’s. Only his brain kept
rolling. He knew he had no money.
The troopers took him to a sumptuous
hospital, and his eyes grew wondrous
as he raved and praised
the decor, the meals. ‘“You can’t imagine!
When I went to pay the nurses
said ‘Mr. Fulton, it was a pleasure
to take care of you. There will be no charge.’ ”’
There will be no charge
for the light or the sea’s
skillful flippancies with it,
for the moon softening
the scene with its own
peculiar politeness.
After years of plea-bargaining
with a snooty muse, I’ve landed
here, where there’s nothing I dread
doing. Gifts fall into my hands
from unindicted coconspirators; suddenly
all three Fates shine
their everloving light on me.
I’m free to watch the dunes
take on the chill
color of shells, the sea
beckon and threaten like a roof’s edge,
an absentminded thing.
The way the tide rips itself
out sideways, thoughtless as a torn seam.
And people find things here I’ve heard:
Portuguese dolls, once encased in airy
pink and green crinolines swish in,
their mouths still
red and pouting. Here on the fragile tip
of this peninsula anything could
return. I’m half-prepared
for hostile mermaids, pilot whales, stranded
miscreants clad in moss and furs.
I’m half-prepared to see my father
to whom the world gave nothing
without struggle, rise up beaming
anyway upon it, as if he never meant
to let it go. Saltboxes appear and disappear
in the slurry fog. Gulls open
against the sky like books
with blank beautifully demanding pages,
and behind me the stolid ocean
slams itself on earth
as if to say that’s final
though it isn’t. Behind me the ocean
stares down the clouds, the little last remaining
light as if to remind me of the nothing
I will always have
to fall back on.
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