There was a man that night on the lovers’ moon
walking as if on water—he was not a Kennedy,
though a Kennedy had sent him. Morning and
evening at high and low tide the relentless black
Atlantic pouring in and out under the planking
of a bridge that has no sides to stop you if you
miss a step in the island dark. Chappy is cheaper,
which is why I’m here, years later, the rentals
so far from one another it’s the loneliness that’s
costly. Easy enough to be a tourist to tragedy,
the poor arced passage between the beach road
and the beach hardly large enough to bike on
let alone drive a car at midnight without lights
to make a sharp right turn toward the moon.

 

 

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Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) authored twelve poetry collections and directed the MFA program at the University of Maryland. His Collected Poems has just been published by W.W. Norton.

 

 

 

Photo by Kamran Abdullayev via Unsplash+.