Point Shirley

From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison

The shingle booms, bickering under

The sea's collapse.

Snowcakes break and welter. This year

The gritted wave leaps

The seawall and drops onto a bier

Of quahog chips,

Leaving a salty mash of ice to whiten

In my grandmother's sand yard. She is dead,

Whose laundry snapped and froze here, who

Kept house against

What the sluttish, rutted sea could do.

Squall waves once danced

Ship timbers in through the cellar window;

A thresh-tailed, lanced

Shark littered in the geranium bed —-

Such collusion of mulish elements

She wore her broom straws to the nub.

Twenty years out

Of her hand, the house still hugs in each drab

Stucco socket

The purple egg-stones: from Great Head's knob

To the filled-in Gut

The sea in its cold gizzard ground those rounds.

Nobody wintering now behind

The planked-up windows where she set

Her wheat loaves

And apple cakes to cool. What is it

Survives, grieves

So, battered, obstinate spit

Of gravel? The waves'

Spewed relics clicker masses in the wind,

Grey waves the stub-necked eiders ride.

A labor of love, and that labor lost.

Steadily the sea

Eats at Point Shirley. She died blessed,

And I come by

Bones, only bones, pawed and tossed,

A dog-faced sea.

The sun sinks under Boston, bloody red.

I would get from these dry-papped stones

The milk your love instilled in them.

The black ducks dive.

And though your graciousness might stream,

And I contrive,

Grandmother, stones are nothing of home

To that spumiest dove.

Against both bar and tower the black sea runs.