A Drowning

Late in the year of exits,
we tried to get our minds off spring,
and so drove south toward water,
without a plan, each thinking
about the onrushing shortness
of days, and encroaching cold,
and the need for strong coffee
to make up for our feeling old.

The town stove in long ago,
but the museum held some light,
and we walked from the parked car
with scant hope that there might
be something worth seeing, displays
like we sought in Boston, in better times.
What we found were sailing artifacts,
whale bones, a book of doggerel rhymes.

We looked at the shaving bowl
of a man who went hunting for a shake
of some rare oil, but too late
realized his fatal mistake:
watching the whale dive, he stood
too close to a coil of wet rope,
which took hold of his ankle and pulled him
straight into a gray slope.

Far across the water his grave
was someone in a rundown shack,
waiting for word that never came to
confirm he wasn’t coming back.
She guessed at his fate but
never learned where he had gone,
left only with an impression in a bed,
the absence where a man had been.

Weeks passed outside the curtains, but,
blind to each falling leaf,
she paced the dim, cluttered rooms
hung with the harps of her grief.