Hatteras

A hoarse gray sea grinding shells in its jaws,

a beach bitten through to the dunes-

a month-old child clutched between us,

we stagger through steep wet sand.

Plovers, tatters of summer trash, swirl

overhead, crying sleet, sleet!

Our cut-rate cabin

leans in, mildewed, peeling,

a steamer trunk pitched up by the last hurricane.

You drug the child with milk, I place him

in a wooden drawer on the luggage stand

and we face each other like kidnappers

weary of conspiracy, the shrill demands.

Here is love

objectified: inert, needy, perpetually

soiling himself; larger than nothing

but not much. Color TV washes over us

in bed, and you worry my hand

as if it was a remote control command

that could fine-tune this bad static

or switch us

to the younger versions of our nights

haunting this coast. South of here, the summer

where our childless love-sweat was steeped

in humid gardenia from a bedside vase.

You stung my mouth like tequila straight.

I measured your white arms against live oaks.

Now you sleep

flaccid and sore as a drained breast, body

half-thrown over mine, a flimsy comforter.

At the foot of the bed a tiny growth sucks air,

brain ticking toward its two-hour alarm.

Outside, the boarded-up amusements of Nags Head:

Maybe we can slip away, I sing to myself

in the car,

a ton of glass and steel loyal to the slightest

pressure of will. At seventy miles an hour

I can feel the highway shrug off everything

human: the bondage of condos and 7-11's,

the singles' bars noisy with love's barbaric proposals,

a last bait shack draped with buglight necklace.

Moments later

the car ticks at the edge of a wildlife refuge,

landing strip for tired migrants-plovers, terns.

I let the headlights die on the black heraldry

of cormorants drying outstretched wings. Across

the mud-shallows, the susurrus-almost a wind-

of ten thousand feathers folded, refolded.

Our marriage

was young when we witnessed two swans

courting in a Horseneck Beach salt pond.

Necks dipping in a grave contradance

of sexual entreaty, they circled and crossed

in figure eights. Like an infinite pledge,

the cold, generic radiance of their rite:

ripples

lapping my boots in the reed-shallows.

"Where the feathers were," I said

of the goose-bumps stippling your arms,

and I told you other auguries: that plovers

foretold rain, that ospreys mated for life,

insulating the nest with flotsam, year

after year,

till the tree-fork collapsed beneath

the evidence of their loyalty: ragmops,

boots, gull wings, hats, barrel staves,

bleached sheep skulls, snapped oars, sailcloth . . . .

You stopped listening after the for life.

In dry salt hay we lay grooming each other,

disagreeing:

where to live, what to do, why to do it.

Black wings equal longing, white wings mourning,

I'm telling myself, without conviction: love

is tired of its great mythical wings,

tired of where it came from, where it must go.

Slamming the car door, I flip on headlights:

the fugitive birds

rise heavily, circling, complaining, and I

spin the wheel, caught back up in the slow

cumulative whirlwind of sodden diapers, dolls,

checkstubs, dried floss, eggshells, peelings

of carrot and cucumber, shoeboxes bursting with bad

snapshots, with laundry lint, pubic hair and dust.