Reading a Memoir at Cedar Island

We arrive eight hours before morning

but the Sound luminesces enough to gloss

jabbed brushstrokes of cedar, the strand

prickled with fringes of eelgrass,

and the world's baby teeth ground down

to this pall of sand.   

It's gusting so strong I can barely pee straight —

You can see in each stunted and strung-out

live oak the shape of the wind's hands.

On this last stand before the Outer Banks

Sharon makes camp while I pay twenty quarters

to shelter stunned

and out-of-context. Such bare slubs of land

the memoir I'm reading calls griefscapes.

The groove fits my tongue

so for forty more pages I keep the light on,

pulled by a man oaring

his way through childhood to a stung

and moondamp first place, all slap and vowel

and grunt-pine punctuation, the no-way-satisfied   

lessing & moring

of the tideshore. I knew in advance of reason

this freight of rain, salt in my hair.

That child I was, what was she mourning

before death charged his first fare?

We wake and hurry to slip our moorings.

The ferry's there.