The battle group is retiring
to Hampton Roads.
A fighter jet shreds a small part of the morning.
Out of the fog at water's edge a gull lights, lands,
and stoops like a vagabond on the cracked concrete below.
I'm on a balcony, behind wet bars of steel.
Invisible surf lashes an insistent rhythm
along the shore,
until another jet drowns the waves.
April is a fine month for dancing:
the gull pivots; I lean along the railing, willing;
but neither of us is going to lead.

You are turning thirty
in Milwaukee.
Air traffic there is commercial, mostly,
distant white vapor trails in blue Midwestern sky.
Perhaps a woman on your street corner,
with a faint paisley scarf and oily tattered cuffs,
motionless in the sun, holds your thoughts inland.
What can Atlantic spray mean to you,
miles from even the great Lake's false smell
of salt decay and ocean rot?
A woman in a scarf, hunched like a startled bird.

In the face of Virginia fog, nothing but memory—
memory, the slashing of the sea.
On my fingertips, I gather fresh condensation
from the cold balcony rail
and drizzle it down toward the bird still below.
Each drop quivers on the air, then is swallowed in the swell,
in the deep churning waters
of the past. A closer mist gathers about my eyes;
salted drops chase the fresh water
dripping from my fingers.
The vagabond bird is startled;
it shakes itself, rises, and wheels
on the wind. It pushes inland,
carrying saltwater fog toward blue skies
in the impossible west.
A tattered woman one time zone from here blinks once,
then twice, and ambles away on cracked concrete.

***

Swamp Walking

We get where we can on bunched tufts of growth.
The farther we go, the softer the ground.
We know we should stop and turn back around,
but swelling frog calls and dusk draw us forth.
You're in between; it's in the way you stand,
the way you walk, the way you balance your
arms to stay above the muck: before
each step you reach back almost to my hand.