Winter on the Cape
In this wind, the foam at the front of waves
splinters and flies up the beach in sudsy little balls
and on the bay side the waterline flirts with frozen,
gets sludgy. Snow in the dunes the color of sand.
It’s hard to tell what you’re looking at.
I walk alone on empty beaches. Wind
hurtles off the water, slams my skull.
Absent is the briny tang of ocean
and this is disconcerting. How can the ocean
not smell like the ocean? A duck appears
then sinks back into inky troughs of waves.
Too cold for things to ferment.
Where I’m staying it is pungent. Before I came
Ned simmered bones all night for broth
and by morning they’d run dry, oozed black.
Guests staying upstairs called to wonder or complain.
We threw open windows, burned incense.
I run too far with the wind at my back, I play
at permanence. Two days after I leave, a full moon
sends the high tide gushing through the streets--
Dune changes. Washout.
The beach stretches on and it’s a long way back.
I even out, settle into a space where I won’t
crack. Wet sand creased like a wrinkled brow,
snow in the crevices.
This morning Ned said he dreamt about me
but he didn’t say how and I didn’t ask.
Away from the beach, out of the wind
coyote tracks edge onto a frozen pond.
I walk through stunted trees
until warmth blazes in my farthest places.
I think what they say is true, that to get something
you have to stop wanting it.
The next day I find the raw salt smell of ocean
locked up in a half frozen block of seaweed.
No one’s around to see, so I plant my face in it,
inhale. A sanderling blows in, lands nearly
at my feet, the same one as yesterday, I assume
because it hops on its one leg, probing the wrack line
between shuttered hotels, making do.
splinters and flies up the beach in sudsy little balls
and on the bay side the waterline flirts with frozen,
gets sludgy. Snow in the dunes the color of sand.
It’s hard to tell what you’re looking at.
I walk alone on empty beaches. Wind
hurtles off the water, slams my skull.
Absent is the briny tang of ocean
and this is disconcerting. How can the ocean
not smell like the ocean? A duck appears
then sinks back into inky troughs of waves.
Too cold for things to ferment.
Where I’m staying it is pungent. Before I came
Ned simmered bones all night for broth
and by morning they’d run dry, oozed black.
Guests staying upstairs called to wonder or complain.
We threw open windows, burned incense.
I run too far with the wind at my back, I play
at permanence. Two days after I leave, a full moon
sends the high tide gushing through the streets--
Dune changes. Washout.
The beach stretches on and it’s a long way back.
I even out, settle into a space where I won’t
crack. Wet sand creased like a wrinkled brow,
snow in the crevices.
This morning Ned said he dreamt about me
but he didn’t say how and I didn’t ask.
Away from the beach, out of the wind
coyote tracks edge onto a frozen pond.
I walk through stunted trees
until warmth blazes in my farthest places.
I think what they say is true, that to get something
you have to stop wanting it.
The next day I find the raw salt smell of ocean
locked up in a half frozen block of seaweed.
No one’s around to see, so I plant my face in it,
inhale. A sanderling blows in, lands nearly
at my feet, the same one as yesterday, I assume
because it hops on its one leg, probing the wrack line
between shuttered hotels, making do.
Kateri Kosek’s poetry and essays have appeared in such places as Orion, Terrain.org, Catamaran, Northern Woodland Magazine, and Creative Nonfiction, where, most recently, she was awarded for best essay. She teaches college English and mentors in the MFA program at Western CT State University, where she earned an MFA. Kateri has been a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and this past summer, the Tallgrass Artist Residency in Kansas. She lives in the mountains of western Massachusetts, but needs to see the ocean at least once a year.