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| The off-season |
Why do you leave for happiness?
Why not stay around a while?
I haven't seen the sea since before the pandemic,
and I miss it, the unbroken curve of the horizon,
the surrender to tides and to wind, the cry of the gulls,
the advance and retreat of the surf effervescent,
the erasure of where we have been,
the great weight of the swells' rise and fall —
ah, by the sight and the smell,
by the sound of collapse and retreat,
the sea soothes the pangs of the heart.
Yet, here I sit on the porch with the dog,
contented in Pennsylvania, both of us
scanning the treeline for visitors,
rabbits and deer emerging at the margins
of the fallow field returning to woodland,
watching it happen, taking the long view in time,
listening to the wind in the crowns at twilight
and hearing the surf as it recedes on flat sand,
sensing the sea from my porch, sane in this place,
nearing the end of my eighth decade on Earth,
I've paid my price and am here for the duration.
—with three lines from Henri Cole's Sow with Piglets
