by Maximillian Orsini
(for Nikki)
Yesterday, at Falmouth Harbor, the waves
were breaking, sweeping in and rushing
back like years slipping
from your hold, waters coming in
touching your toes cold, and vanishing
like sons you might have had
and the one son whose life warms
the absence years later.
You, who dove headlong in the furious waters
of your twenties, now forty-two and waste deep
in mistakes and dreams you held and then let go,
aspirations of late August that kept you
longing for the slender bodies of young men,
blunts and half-blunted hopes, blue-light Sexton poems,
cool nights and Cape breezes that still blow
with ambivalence years later when you drive
East from home and glance from the window
of your black car down over Cape Cod Canal
thinking about what lives and dies and rushes
back to us as we cross this bridge, you and I,
into another speechless dusk.