Our landmarks gone.
Rough violent winter
gouged the golden sandhills
collapsed the grassy lookouts
from the top, the wooden benches,
platforms to descent. Parachutes
would be best way down today
from pathways once welcoming.

Here, below, walking along the mid-tide
strand, I note — broken, buried —
the stairs we’d climb post-season
to see the world from absent strangers’ lawns
imagining lives in their old high houses
hidden behind blossoms or green branches
heavy with summer.

No soft clay pits halfway up
we and our children bathed in
shiny Augusts, they charging
naked, glazed, down to the water
we more decorous in our ugly beauty masks.

No horizontal birch tumbled one September
from Windy Gates —
a smooth white trunk we’d sit on
watching the forever sea. Yet
sun-miracled February morning:
unexpected calm.

Bundled in winter privacy still
I stop, move slowly now,
observe as on safari:
a cowardly lion, hunched in his
leaf-frayed jungle of ravine,
the profile of a buffalo atop a sudden chalky wall.

And more clay beasts from childhood books
peering at me, crowded against the mesa
under a blue blue February sky
foreign but so familiar
here at the sea-edge now
the sea-carved sea-washed boulders
I stand between:
Capetown’s Table Mountain and an Aran Isle,
antarctic glacier and the gravestones
of explorers, brave companions
going going gone. . .

Once on this treasured journey
not so many Junes ago
these rocks, invisible part of the sand-cliff then
created shelter for our picnics,
coves we lovers hid in,
watching swift couples, dogs and children
pass a curious whale or dolphin
poking its head above the waves.

No landmarks.
Exotic stamps flash in the homebound mind

low tide a Vineyard life going out
how soon back in