We park beside the lighthouse keeper’s garden.
A hummingbird is unbalancing hibiscus flowers;
a nuthatch, tidying up the trunks of trees.
I didn’t know its name the last time we were here.
What else did I not know? What else has happened?
This is a place we don’t seem to mind returning to
after the dog, without him, maybe because
it looks like time made walkable. The fins of gneiss,
upright like vinyl in a bin, ride down
the promontory in parallel, in company,
in step the way one always is in time
and differing the way one always does in time,
until the edges, gentled but ungiving,
march into, and under, the covering slaps, uncovering hiss.
How many years has it been since we were here?
How many summers, which should be spaced apart in memory
by winters, like mica planes by quartz, but aren’t?
The way we’ve divvied up remembering, it’s you
who knows dates, and I, like the late dog,
have better luck with hows. With which ridge here
leads over the crown more or less safely, for instance,
to the sideways mille-feuille of dressmaker’s curves, the serried shark’s teeth,
the organ pedals of stone that run into the sea.
We clamber, wobble, resteady. You scrape a delicate shin.
The others here, straight, I think, selfie
early, but we, old marrieds, also not too good
for public individuation, also
living a common thing, venture further down
the slope to where white granite crosses in.
Like the fill-in flesh of scar. “I love your scars,” you swore
the other day. “But they’re not me!” I shouted.
Two cameras ago, I photographed the grainless
rock intruding into grained, but not
today. One takes a picture when one can’t come back.
To Paris, youth. But us in front of rocks
that show off change that doesn’t change in human lifetimes?
“It doesn’t matter,” I said one night. I meant
our visit to geology. “Not even us?”
you asked, not meaning you and me, exactly,
I think, but something in between that will not last,
that matters to us more because it won’t.
Before the boulders at the end, the crashed-upon,
we find a dimple that has kept some sea,
a double handful: kelp and ticklish hermit crabs
and limpets in a temporary world.
Because we happen to be here, we see the water’s
clarity and beauty, pointlessly,
the giving element that washes rock away.