The foam
blew towards me up the beach
frantically, before the gale, as in a movie that no one
would believe. That was two days before the snow covered
all but the red tips of winter bushes and the sallow dune-grasses, the beach
and the foam different versions of white, the one stable, the other
a changing line that washed the tan margin of sand between them. There were
skipping-stones, and I learned
to skim them onto the trough, parallel to the wave. In this water,
Caroline remarked, you wouldn't last long, her face
reddening in the wind wanting to blubber, her feet
ached so. There was a barren: dwarf pine,
foxes and rabbits, deer. I had been thinking
of the young polish girls, lapins
they were called, whom the nazis
tested their surgery on, removing pieces of their skeletons and sewing them
up again. "Bunnies." never to have children,
never to have rest from pain.
Even at Montauk, where all the roads end, there is a camp and the sand
is filled with bodies. Plumes of mist
on the water.
I had looked for a resolution.
My loved-ones are here. The dead
shall be raised, the radio sings
to me, incorruptible,
and we shall be changed.