Across Causeways

I have left you behind, old ocean,

blithely erased your midnight churnings 

from down wind-tipped streets

of empty wood-panelled sandboxes, 

like typing a fence-line of black X's 

across a misspelled word on the page. 

These were summer nights

where bright-banded constellations 

seemed vast enough

to swallow our youth whole,

as we lazed drunk and bewildered

in the rickety lifeguard watch-stands. 

Or the blue mornings of February

walking to the corner for the bus,

rifles booming hollow and black

from the duck blinds out in the reeds.

Past hundreds of miles of 

snake-crawled swamp and 

woods and yawning fields,

I still wake sometimes and feel

you lapping your fragmented shore,
somewhere out in all that darkness.