Resisting the Need to Know
This past Wednesday after work I walked down to the piers in Provincetown Harbor. The day was not easy, and as I walked I felt like I was carrying many pounds of grief with me. Some of it was mine and some was what I knew others close to me were holding onto.
There is much to grieve right now. The thousands of people who are dying each day are at the top of that list. But we are also grieving a way of life that suddenly stopped existing, and many of the plans we had when we thought that that way of life was inevitable.
As I walked over the water on the piers that day, a shelf of clouds was coming from the west, approaching the harbor as the sun set. The forecast called for rain early the next morning. But given P-Town’s oddly charming position on a sliver of land — at the very end of Cape Cod — that hooks southwest back toward the mainland, the forecast is really just a rough guess of what may happen. A successful weather prediction here, where we are sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and Cape Cod Bay, is one that is at least seasonally adjacent to what actually occurs.
The piers were nearly deserted, just me and a couple out walking. Even while appropriately socially distanced I could hear their conversation; one of the men wanted to head home because the clouds looked ominous and he didn’t want to get rained on. The other man insisted the rain was hours away and they’d be fine. I assumed they had been cooped up inside together for many weeks, so bickering about the weather was probably not the worst thing that could be happening between them.
Their argument triggered the first line of the third stanza of this poem, and the rest of that stanza quickly followed in my head as I continued to walk. I managed to remember it until I got home, where I wrote it down and then quickly wrote the first two stanzas. Together the three stanzas tell something resembling a story about a couple that has been letting each other down in various ways. Perhaps this was a subconscious attempt to channel the men from the piers, but there are elements from my past and current relationships woven in here too.
But I think the piece is also about the uncertainty of the current situation and the things big and small that have changed — especially the lost futures (near or distant, human or otherwise) that most of us had assumed were on lock.
Forecasts
I filled up my heart with clouds weaving
around your shrinking head — shapes in the sky
that could not be held by anyone’s hand.
I saw the shadows of a future that was
stranded on an island, where you said
no man had lived for years.
(I think you really meant ever.)
You promised rain but it never came,
as I danced in circles around barrels of words
(yes, I kept them all)
you tapped out on the sunny days,
pulling yourself deeper into a story that never ends.
29 April 2020
