Dunes

When I finally reached them, a young father 
was trying to teach his daughter how to cast. 
She flicked her wrist, overshot, found the motion 
the second time around. I’d run four miles 
to get here & didn’t think I’d make it, then sat 
awhile attempting to be still, to regard the teenagers 
stripping down to their suits with recognition, 
kindness, & not my usual judgment aimed inward. 
Yesterday, an ecologist was explaining how 
so much in nature forms from loss—take beaches, 
he’d said, damage the desired state for a certain 
kind of growth. On the walk home my feet hurt, 
I came across a turtle in the road, flies attaching 
to its split shell, & waited for someone else 
to move it. Like how she’d told me I needed 
to open, but how? I mean it literally: I can’t figure 
out the mechanics. Online another poet vows 
not to collude anymore with modes of despair. 
But what about the opposite, what it would mean 
to shelter despair like a child or childhood pet? 
This is me trying to make an opening. For some-
thing unformed to enter. A new kind of noticing. 
The willingness to risk failure for the possibility
of love. On the dunes, a dark-haired woman walking 
barefoot along the shoreline smiled as she passed. 
I smiled back. Farther out now, the teenagers 
splashed in the waves, & as I listened to the pitch 
of their voices could tell they weren’t teenagers 
at all but somewhere in the middle of their lives.