Ashokan Farewell

On a moaning towel, between the dune-grass and
Dunes, behind the rock with a shape cut from it:
Her.
Reading romance on the beach without shame -
As woman can.

I walked past her four times. Twice going there,
And twice coming back.
My last return she turned
Over showing the backs of her legs
(Oh) to the whip of the sun.
Doing so tilting her song
Sideways across afore mentioned dunes.
Under those dunes may be cans
Broken glass dead pelicans
Even the USS Monitor maybe.
I would have joined them to be beneath:
Her.
She was all a man could want for a night.

I've tried to drown
My ears of her sound.
Taking long strokes to the diving platform,
Holding my head underwater, and deep,
Until my ears pop. There still hearing it while
The diving platform swings.

That was summer and a little fall
Twelve years ago every day.
I moved inland.
I have not returned.

That song jars me together with
The shards in my skins, the stinking
Dead pelicans, the rusty hull.
We married two years later.
She left me last spring.
(Oh).