Hometown for an Hour: Poems

Cape House

Cape House for the Abends A chime of some sort tinkles next door like a sweet calf’s cowbell. Wind brushes the dune’s hair distractedly, pausing sometimes as if to stare into the bay’s half-silvered mirror. Nothing is there. The moon, with its squashed newborn head, is asleep and the gulls have gone wherever gulls go when they are not eating or laughing. (Sometimes I’ve seen them way down the beach, sitting, round and huge as some extinct thing’s eggs, until my approach hatches them.) A frog visits here nightly, leaping at the windows like a child at Christmas shop displays. He reminds me of myself, trying to get in to the lemony light, the syrup of home at night. Wellfleet’s electric constellations begin to wink almost merrily the orange pink of distant bonfires. Huddled together they look like the lights of a gambling ship anchored offshore. Night is a velvet barge that fills the harbor. Wellfleet’s lights are also votives lit for its fleet of black boats that trawl the bay daily. The July 13 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. after my mother died, my cousins and I lit the beach with dozens of sparklers— candles on the medieval cakes of sandcastles we’d made. For them it was just another way to celebrate the holiday. For me it was building a city that still had joy in it. Beneath the bay’s gray waves, hermit crabs kept changing homes, as I would many times after that summer. Low tide splayed out its interesting assortment of things, interpretable like the I Ching, though I had no key to their meanings then. Sun glinted off boats like decoder rings but I could not tell if the gulls were laughing or crying. Two decades have fortified the dunes though not my heart. Home is still a tidal flat, unbuildable: one minute, a drained moat; then cormorants poke up their periscope necks from its depths like a cartographer’s sea monster. How shall I live? Wellfleet’s lamps are lit, rose gold estate jewelry I’ll never inherit, and I’ve nothing to prove I’m more than a tourist here—or anywhere, really. Way out in the bay Jeremy Point’s lights flash red and green, like some small town’s lone intersection 14 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. guiding phantom traffic all night, and Billingsgate Island’s buried foundations lie shipwrecked beneath the waves, like the towns they drowned to make the Quabbin Reservoir out west. I hear there are reunions of the residents whose towns the government flooded, a kind of club to mourn coming from somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore except in their minds and a few sepia photographs. Grief like that surrounds me the way water did when I walked out to Jeremy Point and the tide came in. Tonight’s tide has tiptoed in, not wanting to wake anyone, though I’m here alone waiting up for its reassuring step on the beach and then its hush-hush in my ear like a kind lover’s sweet breath as we sleep. What made me swim to land that day I stood stranded on the last patch of sand out there in the bay? I’d hiked to the Point because it had haunted my sight so long—I’d even tried to paint it—and I wanted to visit a place so often imagined it was as strong as memory, like my phantom home. Of course it was just sand. I found this house with my binoculars—the fat chimney and eel grass lawn, the many windows 15 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. I’d looked out of at the very horizon I now stood poised on. Had I left on a light, some beacon to my...