VISITORS
Having just arrived, we are walked down a moonless
boardwalk cutting through seagrape and orchids
and whatever wasn’t lost to hurricane or frost
is dark now and trembling in the cool night air, then
down to a beach that erodes each winter, shifting
with our weight as we step on it, still warm, and go
to the place where water touches land, soft
and mutable shoreline of this barrier island
he has chosen to live on, against our better judgment.
The ocean waves roar like wild things freed, pounding
the sand and washing away footprints, the anonymous
leavings of anonymous lives, while my father,
a little stooped now, stands apart, as if waiting
for our approval, or merely thinking his own thoughts.
A huddled black shape, blacker than the night
so we know it’s really there, with the clear silhouette
of a pelican’s bill a few yards away
sits motionless as a tourist taking in the view
but mixed-up, here at the wrong time of day, and
Don’t go any closer my father says, for somehow
he knows this bird is no visitor but one
who’s come to take in his last view of earth,
the place where desire or memory brought him
and from which he must know he won’t rise again,
and we stand awhile, marveling as his perfect calm,
the near regal set of the old weathered bill
that points straight ahead toward an indistinct space
through which we can hear the rush of each wave
coming closer every moment, as if they can’t wait
to reach him and carry him back to their home
and he waits, as if it’s his purpose and his choice;
then my father shepherds us all away,
moving more slowly but just as determined,
and we step on the boardwalk and follow him back
through stubborn survivors of wind and loss
to the place where he knows he belongs.
