“No Dogs” the sign states,
“Closed Sunset to Sunrise”
Predawn: Hank-Puppy has already slunk
through the space the chains allow the gate and rolls
in a clutch of common rock rose.
Here I go, too—over the fence,
with aplomb. All around, cairns of concrete block
buried in sand pine scrub, white-mouth’d day-flowers
silly around the stern foundations. The gossip of men’s labor
in the decayed road bed
under Hank’s paws as he prowls
between the purple periwinkle and pinwheel flowers
pushing through the crumbling curbs beneath an east just pinking
over the buttonwood and seagrape straddling the seadunes.
To the west, rust grapples
with the height of a radio tower.
Hank’s nose drives him diving ditch to ditch, fleabane
to primrose: he playfully darts at bumblebees just waking up
from wet sleeps in blankets of dew; he sniffs something
foul in the depths of panicgrass
and rolls in it, until I dissuade him
of the effort. Ahead, the road succumbs to trail, overcome
with spiderling, four-o-clocks, and beach peanut,
magenta and triumphant as we circumvent actual spider webs
of orb weavers and silver gardens.
Until, at last, we lope a strip
of sand slinking between the abandon of morning glory
to a deserted beach, waves erupting under a crackling sun.
Hank headfirst into the surf trying to eat the waves and kill the sea;
he is a Jack Russell, after all,
unaware of weight classes. The build
and mash of seabreak inches toward a trunk of driftwood
turned upright, screwed into the sand, bedecked
with beach sunflowers plucked from where they grow
at the feet of the sea oats behind me.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 28, Issue 3.
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