for Drew and Ashley Creech
The evening moved easily above the sea,
throwing the shawl of clouds over its shoulder,
drawing a screen of mist around the cattails.
And the hour opened up like the turquoise fan
of a peacock’s feathers, and the late sun shone
a moment, and that was it: no more seagulls
preening in the trash, no more beach umbrellas
or the sleek bodies of bathers, as the sun sank,
the way it does, behind the grasses, and a few
boys stopped chasing their ball to sit in the sand
and stare a while at the ocean, where the waves
broke, where the spindrift sparked in moonlight,
and things moved in a depth they couldn’t see.
The boys watched the dregs of light turn granular
and pensive across the peach streaks of the sky
as the sun behind them vanished like a cork
gone under. Tired but curious, they each leaned
and squinted into the distance, into the wind,
to see the day’s last, rich attenuations, its daubs
and brushstrokes and its lightless densities—
observers of the shadows, scholars of night,
they studied time’s incalculable subtractions
as the present eroded, slowly, into memory.