Should someone tell you that desire lacks complexity,
Bring them here.
Watch him as he walks alone along the shore,
Trying to decipher the detritus of so many years.
The rounded stones, the grains of sand
A mix of black and gray and brown, packed
In bands the waves have shaded like the faded skins
Of serpents buried long ago, or yesterday.
There is a fragment of a brick worn to a perfect trapezoid.
Some orange shards of tile shaped like sausages.
A dozen gulls screech at the winds, then huddle in threes.
Far down the sands, what seems to be a family
Walks scattered and unbalanced
To the jetty and the light.
Just inward from the world he sees,
He walks his own parabola
And finds the parking lot, stops,
Sits and leans against an oak. He sees
The line of poplars sprouting from the dunes
Like the sprays of golden fountains bending
To an ancient wind. He watches a tall man
Near the surf, waltzing with a metal detector, while
His partner crouches on her knees, pawing at the sand.
A boy skips stones across the crests of waves.
Behind the trees, the hum and grind of the salt mine
Just a variation of the wind’s old song of waiting.
She come as sudden as a cloud from the sky beyond the shore,
And shapes herself by walking, her legs just those
Degrees enough from perfection
To prove that she’s no dream. One hand holds
A paper sack and swings in rhythm with her stride.
She stops and almost turns around, but doesn’t
Moving to a drift log as big as a chair,
She sits in its center, staring out across the
Gray-green water and its foam.
But when he looks again…
If you could hear the words he murmurs,
You would know he has remembered
How it feels to love.
Imagine you were sitting there.
Before the salt mine, before the two-lane
Highway, walking the sandy strips of something
Secret left behind, looking for a place to be alone
With birds and winds and rotting tires. There was a dune
Along the green river, a broken-down marina,
An uncle polishing his boat with care
And wondering where you were…
Whether you were old enough or not, you might remember
A boiling sun sinking past the cottonwoods
Into the black water of the marshes
As if it were a dream that dies each day,
A time to find your way home.
Look again and he has disappeared.
Find him driving past roads almost forgotten
Where tiny cottages and bungalows sit like stunted pines
Between the new developments,
Those beige and cream attempts at opulence.
An iron casting painted green still holds
A clock that has not stopped for anyone.
Look far enough and find him waiting, dreaming
Something that he often dared while digging
Long ago the bottom of a trench.
He would move a pebble, hoping that
Beneath might lie a doorway to the universe
That should have been. He seeks it still,
Expects to find it. Even as he breathes
The universe that is he breathes its other.
The shard of tile, the black grains in the sand,
The golden feathers dropping from the poplar…
It could be anywhere. He will find her there.
This poem first appeared in Gardenopolis (2017).
—
David Adams is a poet living in Burton, Ohio. He has been a laborer, academic and technical writer. Hope As a Construction, his 11th collection of poems, was published by Bottom Dog Press in 2023. His prose memoir, Casual Labor, was published by Blue Shale Books in 2021. David collaborated with the composer Dawn Sonntag to complete Clara: A Life and Death in Shadow, an opera in three acts about Clara Haber.
