Nicole Pekarske

We arrive eight hours before morning but the Sound luminesces enough to gloss jabbed brushstrokes of cedar, the strand prickled with fringes of eelgrass, and the world's baby teeth ground down to this pall of sand. It's gusting so strong I can barely pee straight — You can see in each stunted and strung-out live oak the shape of the wind's hands. On this last stand before the Outer Banks Sharon makes camp while I pay twenty quarters to shelter stunned and out-of-context. Such bare slubs of land the memoir I'm reading calls griefscapes. The groove fits my tongue so for forty more pages I keep the light on, pulled by a man oaring his way through childhood to a stung and moondamp first place, all slap and vowel and grunt-pine punctuation, the no-way-satisfied lessing & moring of the tideshore. I knew in advance of reason this freight of rain, salt in my hair. That child I was, what was she mourning before death charged his first fare? We wake and hurry to slip our moorings. The ferry's there.

Smoketrees line the roadside, still-bare beech and poplar bouqueted with redbud and something rusty I can't name, March's odd autumnals — One-church towns I'm glad not to be from, split-log strip mall with a porch where Claire's beauty shop shares a sign with "Antigues," where you study grace in magazines, and when dad dies you rename the family diner New York New York. Love is a means of travel, so you dye the linens pink and swan-fold napkins, holding peony in your mouth. Sundays drive out to watch the ferry drag its lace. Coastward, Easter-colored clapboard, the last generation's shanties hovering on narrow stilts above the velour drift of tide plain (mink from a distance, muskrat up close), a drowsy instrumental music, flooded at dusk. Beside the bridge, smooth brow of pewter. Island of saplings blackened like a framed-up house.