I.

At Duxbury, there is a long dry-planked bridge to the beach.

You leave Massachusetts, and your first twenties, behind you.

Ahead is Dorothy. The name a name to say, Dorothy, and say.

I was to turn right, turn my yellow Model A Ford roadster,

And drive like hell on wet packed sand, not too near the surf,

Not too high in dry sand, for three miles I'd never seen,

And not stop.

There was a car in the water. I could sink in sand.

Somebody at the bridge, in wet swimming-trunks, and his friends,

While I was looking for the wheel-tracks, told me to half-deflate

The tires, or they'd heat on the sand and burst. I did that.

That made me feel sure I'd make it. I had advice, and a Ford,

Also my father and mother, and a rumble-seat full of vacation.

He trusted me, I trusted the gas-pedal. She was small, she

Smiled, and with a left hand kept the scarf that kept her hair.

The air, the air, sun! We hardly knew what to say about it.

In West Somerville we were never much out in open wind.

It was so big in my mouth and eyes I could only steer.

When my father pointed, shouting, at gulls, I did not look.

We scudded, we the wind, the wind in the sails of our lives.

But I was older. It was my car. They'd never had a car.

The Atlantic is the Atlantic Ocean, a deep, a blue sleeping,

Its beaches many, this is one only, inside the Cape Cod hook.

Here it lazes in in-curved curves of surf, breathing half-tide.

Mile and a half.

So far a gaiety, they think. So far no mistakes.

Two miles.

A dashboard glance. The sun-hazed ocean now

Is infinitely flat at my left. Sand-blaze narrows my eyes.

I twist off wet starfish, find hard beach, wheels' grip, slide

A rear tire, dodge yesterday's driftwood,

thirty miles an hour

On a tightrope anchored at the cousins' cottage on the far cliff,

The Gurnet.

My father says, "I see the lighthouse!" I see it.

I watch every least sea-shell-god-damn-kelp-wrack under and ahead.

Three miles.

Yank right, gun it, bull it, will it through sand,

And we are up through a gap in dunes, and on grass, and there.

II.

High here at the Gurnet, sea-air, salt-cool, never stopped

Blowing. Back of the house it was quiet, on the fore-cliff never,

And sun burned skin, and bleached hair. We had come to this.

My girl-cousins (I was in love with the one my age) ran, ran

In and out, long-bare-legged, helping unload my car, monstrous

Inappropriate Model A. I wanted to throw a tarpaulin over it.

The house belonged there, bare shingles weathered silver,

The doors dark worn green, like the bushes, the chimney bricks

Sanded soft pink. The hill to the lighthouse allowed a road.

The girls' bathing suits, that gray blue green gray summer after

Summer color, sea-skin. Arms, shoulders, and legs ambered, as if

Rolled and molded of sun-warmth, smoothed by the wind, silk.

Once the youngest goddesses wore such helmets, that, covering hair,

Made the body the more naked, the eyes in a long oval face wide.

Hungry. Hungry. I wanted to shut myself in from emptiness

Of sea and dune-grass horizon, from the ten-thousand-to-one sky.

Inside, we ate first the bareness. Blue round rag rugs. Floor

Was the color of sand, gritted. Window-glass let in all the blue,

Rattling, and I hunted for books and magazines, but my face

Would not go down into the pages, the books were too small.

Whatever the food on plates was filled me, and the fireplace,

That red-bricked biggest thing in the small house, warmed me.

It shouldered up through the middle of the house, up ledges

Of flat beach rock shelves, through the second floor and out the roof.

We sat in front of it, walked around ends to wash dishes behind it,

It burned chunks and twigs of driftwood, lost lobster-buoys,

The beach and old-water smell. My father and Will smoked pipes.

They had been young together. I decided not to tell them now

About the return trip, the lanky foolish the lucky pilot.

Woodfire in the house at noon.

As it was in the blankets

That night, and the flat pillow. Smoke, surf, sand, and the wind.

Once someone came down the stairs. She knew where I was.

I didn't know where she or anyone bedded, everyone upstairs.

The soft feet went up again; bare, I was sure from the sound.

I said her name, Dorothy, and then again, not loud enough.

My cot creaked, the house-timbers flexed, and I slept

In the unfamiliar rough wool, hearing the fire die, and slept.

III.

We stayed there forever, four days.

At the life-saving station

And lighthouse, a Portuguese crewman with my name, Johnny Holmes,

Showed me the foghorn, and all the bright brass and glass.

I stepped humbly on the gray or white paint. A man's world

And smell, machine oil, paint, bread baking, metal polish,

Windy white uniforms in the hot sun.

Every night the light

Swung silently round the world into my bed every three minutes.

One night the fog came, and that blind voice agonized.

One morning I had breakfast alone with Bertha, my mother's

Straight-eyed Norwegian cousin, but younger, who carved spoons,

And saved the money and shined the copper, and made thick cocoa.

It was caraway-seed-bread toasted, and bacon and eggs twice.

I wanted to be Norwegian, I wanted to be one of her children.

We talked and talked with coffee, the soft crash of surf outside.

Dorothy I was in love with walked me up the beach, not far.

There is a bend of the beach there, and we did not go beyond.

We found interesting driftwood. I never took my eyes off her,

And she never knew my eyes followed her. Too long ago, even then.

And knew that if we walked a mile, the house watched, ships

On the skyline saw us, gulls hung, even the reaching waves said

Nearer you the next time, nearer the next time, nearer the.

I scouted the beach.

I would have to drive my car the length of it.

She and I ran in the surf a little, I yelled more and got wetter,

Crazy a little, she seemed to think, but I liked the cold water.

There was nowhere we could go. And we didn't know what for.

So I grabbed her hand, palm to palm, and ran her so fast she had to hold

My hand hard, and hers was small, and cold from the water. I wanted

To run her right off the beach, away alone together, somewhere away,

Not laughing like this. I looked up. We were running toward the house.

If I had kissed her, that kiss would have been sun-warm,

Lip-wet, hair and cheek smell of the sea-air, and like a girl.

There were wings over us, and the seagulls' cry, small, quick,

Thin, against the long shouldering and falling of summer surf,

And sandpipers scattering ahead of us.

Walkers, I noticed,

The light tracks washed away, as each wave changed a little

The beach there, that shore of time. Cousins mustn't marry.

IV.

Once from the dim hack of the shed, her father saw sunlight

And painted it, the doorway twenty feet away open to the glare.

Early the morning of the last day I went there, into the shed,

Past the poles, tools, stacked shutters, and sat on a box

Thinking what the painter thought.

Nothing. Quiet. Nothing.

One place where there was no wind. The window cobwebs hung still.

Not the end of the world, but world's end. Back wall of a shed.

I could smell my own salt sunburn, there was sand on my wrists

From digging with two bare hands and pouring it back and forth.

It had dried, shining. I wiped it off, left with right, right

With left, and sat on the box, both hands and head hanging.

He must have done the picture sitting here on this box.

The canvas would be propped on another, his paints on the bench.

He smoked a pipe all his waking hours. I wondered where he

Dropped matches, reached where he would, and there was the can,

A round coffee-can, half-full of burnt matches. I dropped one in

And reached for my brush.

I think nobody knew where I was.

The eye moved along the tunnel of shed-stuff, each line sharper,

And there nearer the door, color began, though sun-faded,

Hard-weather-dried into quietness, forgotten before its time.

Then the open door blinding-bright, too bright to see beyond.

The day before, I'd seen in a marsh inlet behind the dunes

The double-ended dory tied to a sailboat, as he'd painted it,

Swinging slowly round, not with tide, but sun on its curves.

He'd painted a rock, a gigantic beach-relic under the cliff,

Something a glacier left, dark and cold on small warm stones,

The colors at ebb-tide, at noon.

He remembered my re-visiting

Places I never visited, he recollected them in tranquillity.

His block-print of a heavy horse and two-wheeled dray, in an alley,

All the whites blocks of sun. The red bandanna over an edge

Of a table with apples in a gray bowl, and a glass of real cider.

Or the old cigar-box, the spool of copper wire. The still-lifes.

And the Gurnet.

This hot quiet shed, with a door open to sun.

They shouted to say the car was ready, and the beach right,

Half-tide and going out.

Car keys. Goodbye and goodbye goodbye.

I knew the hard sand by color, the sea-breeze came from the right

This time. At the halfway point, I saw the house, glancing back,

But if anyone stood on the cliff watching, she was too small,

And ahead the bridge. I'd never seen my father so brown.

I made it in no time. I was glad to get out of there, onto roads.