If in the end happiness is something akin to sea grass
with its gift for leisure wafting on the back side of the dunes

behind a long, northern spit of beach closed due to erosion,
and sadness is at its keenest something like the repetition

of the everyday ambivalence of waves always eating at shore,
this might be cause for putting on shoes and heading inland.

On a sad day the sea air can tag along with you for miles
in silence, as if it were working up the nerve to say something wise,

or else to beg you to reconsider your strategic departure
just minutes before the sun begins to lose interest in the day,

but it never does, and by the time you get to the intersection
of the causeway and the road to the interior there are particulars

you didn’t see when you were meandering in the other direction,
so that, except for the salt in your shirt the sea is all, but forgotten.