Daytrip
by Daniel Gaughan
The strip of boardwalk shoreline lengthens limelit
in the afternoon sun, hugged tight between the choking
motorway, the bluebrown bay.
Reeds stand stalkstill in the dunes,
seaweed cracking green across
the waterfront, draping emerald
the dried corpses
of horseshoe crabs
halfburied in the hard sand of low tide. I’ve grown,
the boy who loved this place,
who daydreamt all winter of squat
beach houses paneled pastel with sunburnt roofs.
Dad taught me to play
baseball in this softwhite sand,
100 feet and a decade from where a highschool friend collapsed drunk
facedown in the black shallows,
seizing at tragedy,
and somehow up to me to haul him out. Like I had
some sort of authority. Years, now,
since I last felt steady in the seabreeze
stalking these sunbleached sidewalks
to anywhere; from our sheetrock motel on 80th
all the way here to long-thin first street,
faceless on the thronging boardwalk.
If only there were love to be lost between me
and the saltrotted planking where I last
remember my grandfather
hickoryskinned and alive. If he could see
me now searching
for myself like a lost wallet, not yet knowing
that everyone is everything they’ve ever been. Seafoam
sizzles and dies all along the coastline
burnt bodies clotting the outdoor section at Hooters.
Last year a boy jumped from a balcony down here.
I search for the place it might have been
in the skyline. It could be any one of these hundred hotels
and I try not to picture
him falling, maybe drunk, maybe not drunk enough,
a thousand instances at once like pinkflesh confetti descending.
The sun subsides to a night lit by fuzzy stars.
I hoped that the proverbial he might be here, some kind man waiting
on the loveworn docks, waiting to make this all make sense,
but I should know better.
A southward rollercoaster screams.
He’s there in the blackening sea, every man I ever loved,
the bald, the liverspotted, the adolescent dead,
faces twisted in the constant midnight ebbing
of the sea and in that darkness
I am.
Stubbly, too much hiding in the eyes, hairline in retreat;
but the same man I hoped not to find.
Silver and intangible he reinvents himself with each passing
of the waves. The man drowns and
I leave him there.
No direction to go but walking on anyway.
Looking always for bodies abandoned in the shallows.