Sanderling
Forget Alaska. Then forget the bleached-
out trap of beach you’ve come to, Spring Break clutch
of condominiums and closed-down theme
parks—neons now pastel—and calcified
nostalgia. Think of nothing but your legs,
of pinching up your knees until you feel
inclined to rig your beak down through the sand.
Then stop.
Dig in.
Begin again. Forget
mole crabs that shiver down and keep those feet
fluttering: dusk has found its chill post-Labor
Day, and the air is full of dragonflies
in pairs. When you retire the shore tonight,
we emerge, pre-snowbird humans still not sure
about our own migration, calling it
a pilgrimage instead of what it is—
delay,
escape,
indulgence of the id.
A ghost crab scuttles perpendicular
beyond our flashlight but disrupts the lip
of waves by balking at the shoreline like
a girl who can’t—but wants to—hibernate,
or her man, whose worry eats his nails away.
The calcium-deposit moon slips up
the whitlow sky, illuminating dunes
we roll each other into. Forget that you
will have to fly back north. Tell us we’re
not settled by the map-edge of our birth.