Lucy, when I die,
I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes
of Virginia Beach.
Here I’ve come every summer for three and a half decades.
Here you and Eleanor
learned to swim in the ocean waves and bodysurf.
Here your mother
and I once walked hand in hand for miles and made love among
warm sand dunes
by starlight when we were young. We grew apart. Argued or kept silent.
Your grandmother and grandfather
died here. Until the end, they could hear the surf breathe and sigh
as wind does
through deciduous trees. Seagulls crying. I keep inhaling the healing
salt air
and tasting the salt of saltwater. After I leave this spindrift life,
the Atlantic Ocean
will continue. Children will keep chasing its waves
as the surf withdraws.
They will run from the waves as the surf comes thundering in. They play
tag with infinity.
Middle-aged couples will walk their black labs and golden retrievers on these
sands that the surf pounds
flat like a drunken fist pounding a smooth oak bar to underscore
some obscure
convoluted point that neither the fist nor the bartender
can truly grasp.
For the truth is far beyond our reach. The truth is that on the day I die
a man will be flying
a kite in the shape of a red Chinese dragon. It will fly so high
he can barely
see it. Baby spotted sharks with their leopard skin wash up
dead on the shore,
their gills clogged with sand after storms. Teenage boys
keep hurling
footballs back and forth as if their muscled bodies are metronomes
for the music
the ocean makes. Shy teenage girls will keep singing their pop songs,
so full of unfulfilled
desire, to the doo-wop, doo-wah of the surf. They will dye
their hair pink
or pale blue as cotton candy. All of it will continue as it always
does, almost
the same. When I die, families will still keep pitching their pastel-colored
awnings, shade tents,
and sun umbrellas like giant dahlias and make their nomad
encampments
on the sand. They will stay a week or two and then depart
for more permanent
shelters inland. Lucy, I like nothing better than walking with you
for hours on the beach.
First, north as far as Fort Story’s No Trespassing signs.
Then south
three miles from 81st Street toward the boardwalk and hotels.
A boy holds
a girl, whose long legs wrap around him. He carries her into
the surf while she
screams ecstatically as the cold waves buffet them. He staggers
but does not fall.
You are recovering from twenty-eight-hour shifts during surgical rotation
at medical school. You tell me
that your sole patient yesterday had cancer. It has metastasized
to lungs, kidney,
spleen, spine, brain. “It is inoperable,” you say. “There’s nothing
I can do,
except make her comfortable.” You mean more oxycontin,
then morphine.
Yard-high letters in the sand spell STEPH HEARTS
DOLLY. All
our thousands of naked footprints crisscross the sand.
A sandcastle
stands with terraces, towers, winding staircases, a moat,
and the most
delicate of arches over the moat. Nothing is all the more beautiful
because it is
fragile. The tide is either coming in or going out.
I don’t know
which. With its bent, outstretched wings, a lone brown pelican
dive-bombs
the ocean, skims low, only a few inches above the waves,
looking for fish.
