We shed our days, the shiny mornings when we drank espresso
at a sidewalk table painted blue while parents walked their children
and their dogs to school, and the blur of late nights when the phone
rang or the radio announced the numbers we did not want to hear
and we could not make it all compute. We strip off days like clothes
we’ve sweated through, brush off hours like flakes of aging skin
or break them off, sharp-edged fragments left on the sand
like evidence a skunk had eaten all four eggs in the nest, last chance
for a species reduced to 70 nesting pairs. Skunks have to eat too,
and the skunk knows at some cellular level that all our days
are numbered. Unable to see the small opening, my mother asks
for help threading a needle to hem her nightgown, too long now
she’s bowed down toward the earth with its relentless pull. But insists
on stitching the hem herself as the children flock to school and parents
walk their dogs home again, as the shorebirds scrape a new nest
and beat the ground with their feet, a dance of starting over,
over and over again despite the skunks, despite the gulls and herons
that will menace once the chicks have hatched, despite the storms
they’ll fly through when they leave this beach in the fall, driven
to reach their wintering grounds, driven to return next spring
until the spring they do not come back, the sand left blank and empty.
as published in Gyroscope, Spring 2023