Nowhere

Why stand there, you might have asked. We looked down windswept beach, breakers crushing in on high tide,

your hat rolling along the tide line, where long braids of kelp had been pushed up the sand by some invisible janitor.

The Atlantic that winter was our motel. The skeletal town had closed for the season, leaving one cramped A&P, one candlepin

alley, bars with fishnet ceilings, the walls hung with rotting lobster traps. Every gray morning, the bay was a miserable

Abstract Expressionist blue, as if Rothko had run out for housepaint again— water everywhere, a spit scribbled in

where horizon met sky. At the point stood a saltshaker—no, the old lighthouse that swept the beach each night

with its patrolman’s torch. Most of that is gone, that world so imminently gone.