Walk here an hour, maybe two, and it happens.
Combers have crested far offshore in the gale,
slide into their troughs and gather close in,
heave their whole pasts on the beach, where the shale
groans and receives them with a turning of stones.
Loss – that pale story – is vaporous here.
Wind’s scoured the self to its primary bone,
November’s longing has blown the beach and a clear
rinsed stretch of shore lies ahead. Look behind:
nothing but footprints, an erasable past –
depressions that fill as you lean toward the wind.
No one would know two walked here last
fall, entangled like kelp in a tide
already at flood. It would never subside.