Nights with the sea’s mouth at my ear,

the moon at the window. Each day

the beach flushed twice over,

newly minted with footprints.

All day walking, Platte Saline,

La Bonne Terre, up the Zigzag

to Giffoine, to the Four Winds

and La Vieille Terre and the town.

Gulls. Distance that’s one side

Normandy, the other wild Atlantic

pouring itself in, the northeaster

that rips up all our words,

all he said and she said

and all they meant: the tale

that’s merely you and I my love,

weary and adrift and wordless

at the light’s end, at supper

in the First and Last where we are

sole audience to some tipsy crew

wondering aloud whither the weather

and whether the weather wizard works.

She says it’s all too blue out there

and all too blue in here. She says

I wish to God I’d never fallen down those bloody stairs.

He says he rather likes the idea of a ratdog.

And so forth. And as for me

I was getting my voice back from the wind,

trying to keep it to myself, I was

thinking how we could be nothing much,

grass in the restless air, a high bird

rising in the baymouth in a landscape

with the light bleeding out of it.

I want to sit here in this moment

of the quick world and watch

the light fall over the long seawall,

the sea beating at the harbour mouth.

I want to be who I want, the wind

rocking me to sleep till I’m still.

I want to be in love with water

and seaweed and lost shoes and you,

taking serious interest in the tides

and the moon’s battered face, the gale

banging at itself, the casual dramatics

of the way the world works out.

The way each day the tide makes

a clear heart’s shape in the bay’s arc.

You the gulls mutter overhead

their cries rising in the last light:

you, you. I can be glad anyone

makes anything at all of anything,

in whatever space there is,

any shape on the delicate air will suffice.