Dan Foley

Borne out of Truro, along the grades of towns as old as the slouched glass paned windows. Could I lean against what shackled wood you made your broad shoulders of? Resting quiet town streets exhaling. The place of which squares and the longer the shingles carpet patches stood at before there was space there to begin with. As if the planky ground had been waiting a century for what came after just one moment, god knows when, the tide falling just as if it were the same lines of sand never knowing what changes hadn’t had to have been made. I could only stand tide-ankled and rain-chested through the crunches of the pink shells of a mollusk. Steam mixed with mist sixty miles off.

In the afternoon, lost tide hours in gray mist, finding where it was to pull through you to the grass-sliced fingers, the crackle glassed reeds growing an inch a month in the sand while I had counted the nails nailed into the floor boards of the kitchen. I pressed along the shore, salt river the color of slate, soft forest above as if the soft ground would cave in if I were only to touch it. The sand stabled hill beneath those trees I thought of as if I could sleep then, their arms reaching down more slowly than I knew they could. Seeing once the time it took for it to know and my knowing of it spilling small grayish light, slackened tide slipping again to sea.

At a corner cut the dunes pillowed steps climbing up from the water, frantic, falling, crawling forward through to the empty space just in front of my feet over and over. The forest floor hard compact sand here at the end of the island thumping the sand through my chest. The steam rising off my chest and settling on the inside of my shirt. The world the coolness in the air crept through cracks of thread. The sign as promised the Samuel Smith tavern site here it was they were, only forest, they were here only now in the forest once where they were is where I was. I counted trees the six feet the foot tracks left stepping through a column that in there was once a man standing. The air the leaves held once rattled with laughter, the pine needles not pointing to knowing where it was set down glass upon the planks of a table. Now a thousand pines left, cold wet breathy gray air, a small depression in the sand cradling the purple shell of a mollusk.

Running I could screech all I could, the steam and mist and now tears condensed on my cheeks, each step taking seeping salt water through my shoes, orange pouring through the gray as it darkened. I knew a thousand names then and couldn’t remember one, their letters all sixty miles off, existing on a map at best. The emptiness of my chest fleshy pink wrapped in memory and the muscles that memories contained, that center the expansive nothing of my lungs slackening with the tide, welling with the drifting atmosphere. The empty center the same air, the steam filling it, the mist, tears, and sweat and the stammering at last of a name without letters only the sand and the way it is pressed into. As if to feel your finger against it as you scrawled your name.

A slanted floor in Provincetown hours later, wondering how we could be seated there at all. The greeny hue postcard middle fingers slapped at me, smiling at me glowing off the gauze of a yellow t-shirt, knowing that one day they would die too. The Dodgers have won the NLCS, your son is at home.