Returning on a Summer Day

It’s June again and the tide’s rising as a pod of silvered
monodon flash like a remnant on the Atlantic.

Pen in hand, I contemplate the photo on my maple table:
a fragment of a faded morning glory sky, gone.

My father’s smiling by my grandparents’ shanty,
(lobster pots behind)—I’m swaddled in his arms.

Dune grass    years pass.
Among the dead I’ll find him.

I climb up Meeting House Lane to the bluff,
a pounding white-waved sea drifting

across an expanse of salt marsh as a soundless
gossamer wing catches morning light.

Meadowlarks scamper the fieldstone wall,
minstrels of song, lyrical bards.

A hedgerow surrounds me as a hermit thrush versifies
in its smudged breast atop a water birch.

Standing by his plot,
I have a memory—

We buried him in February in crystalline snow,
Sr. Athanasius wrote, Mona will be your worry.

(I was one year old). Later, I was told
he translated ancient Irish love songs.

Now I just listen to the sea as a sandhill crane waits
under a silver moon and a nighthawk forages fireflies on the wing.

A dawn walk in blue and amethysts.

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