I don’t know for sure if the West has waves
like these, soft and dark where they meet shore,
stirred and flashed along the edges by New Jersey wind,
where children learn to not be afraid of cold, or the other
things the black salt water hides, the inscrutable
ones that find their home beneath sand and stones.
I can’t know if the sun sets and rises there as here, lit
every day against the pastel shutters of white shore houses.
I can’t picture the heads of lighthouses that rise above our trees,
reflected in the clear underwater of California,
or the shore flickering as it does here, the piers pushed up against it,
lights shut off by the storms that hover over coast.
There remains a softness still, in the seasonality, in the way our hearts shudder
when we pass through a summer too quickly, handing off our home to winter,
sideways snow mixing with white sand, pounding waves until they open.
like these, soft and dark where they meet shore,
stirred and flashed along the edges by New Jersey wind,
where children learn to not be afraid of cold, or the other
things the black salt water hides, the inscrutable
ones that find their home beneath sand and stones.
I can’t know if the sun sets and rises there as here, lit
every day against the pastel shutters of white shore houses.
I can’t picture the heads of lighthouses that rise above our trees,
reflected in the clear underwater of California,
or the shore flickering as it does here, the piers pushed up against it,
lights shut off by the storms that hover over coast.
There remains a softness still, in the seasonality, in the way our hearts shudder
when we pass through a summer too quickly, handing off our home to winter,
sideways snow mixing with white sand, pounding waves until they open.