Lucy, after I die,
I need you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the many sand dunes
of Virginia Beach.
Here I’ve come each summer time for 3 and a half a long time.
Here you and Eleanor
discovered to swim within the ocean waves and bodysurf.
Here your mom
and I as soon as walked hand in hand for miles and made love amongst
heat sand dunes
by starlight after we had been younger. We grew aside. Argued or saved silent.
Your grandmother and grandfather
died right here. Until the tip, they may hear the surf breathe and sigh
as wind does
by means of deciduous bushes. Seagulls crying. I hold inhaling the therapeutic
salt air
and tasting the salt of saltwater. After I go away this spindrift life,
the Atlantic Ocean
will proceed. Children will hold chasing its waves
because the surf withdraws.
They will run from the waves because the surf comes thundering in. They play
tag with infinity.
Middle-aged {couples} will stroll their black labs and golden retrievers on these
sands that the surf kilos
flat like a drunken fist pounding a clean oak bar to underscore
some obscure
convoluted level that neither the fist nor the bartender
can really grasp.
For the reality is way past our attain. The fact is that on the day I die
a person might be flying
a kite within the form of a crimson Chinese dragon. It will fly so excessive
he can barely
see it. Baby noticed sharks with their leopard pores and skin wash up
useless on the shore,
their gills clogged with sand after storms. Teenage boys
hold hurling
footballs backwards and forwards as if their muscled our bodies are metronomes
for the music
the ocean makes. Shy teenage women will hold singing their pop songs,
so filled with unfulfilled
want, to the doo-wop, doo-wah of the surf. They will dye
their hair pink
or pale blue as cotton sweet. All of it would proceed because it all the time
does, virtually
the identical. When I die, households will nonetheless hold pitching their pastel-colored
awnings, shade tents,
and solar umbrellas like large dahlias and make their nomad
encampments
on the sand. They will keep per week or two after which depart
for extra everlasting
shelters inland. Lucy, I like nothing higher than strolling with you
for hours on the seaside.
First, north so far as Fort Story’s No Trespassing indicators.
Then south
three miles from 81st Street towards the boardwalk and lodges.
A boy holds
a lady, whose lengthy legs wrap round him. He carries her into
the surf whereas she
screams ecstatically because the chilly waves buffet them. He staggers
however doesn’t fall.
You are recovering from twenty-eight-hour shifts throughout surgical rotation
at medical faculty. You inform me
that your sole affected person yesterday had most cancers. It has metastasized
to lungs, kidney,
spleen, backbone, mind. “It is inoperable,” you say. “There’s nothing
I can do,
except make her comfortable.” You imply extra oxycontin,
then morphine.
Yard-high letters within the sand spell STEPH HEARTS
DOLLY. All
our 1000’s of bare footprints crisscross the sand.
A sandcastle
stands with terraces, towers, winding staircases, a moat,
and probably the most
delicate of arches over the moat. Nothing is all of the extra stunning
as a result of it’s
fragile. The tide is both 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 some inches above the waves,
on the lookout for fish.