Here you will find the Poem A Walk of poet William Matthews
February on the narrow beach, 3o A.M. I set out south. Cape Cod Light on its crumbling cliff above me turns its wand of light so steadily it might be tolling a half-life, it might be the second-hand of a schoolroom clock, a kind of blind radar. These bluffs deposited by glaaciers are giving themselves away to the beaches down the line, three feet of coastline a year. I follow them south at my own slow pace. Ahead my grandfather died in a boat and my father found him and here I come. If I cleave to the base of the I berm the offshore wind swirls grit just over my head and the backwash rakes it away. If I keep going south toward my grandfatherís house in Chatham, and beyond, the longshore current grinds the sand finer the farther I go. It spreads it wider and the beaches sift inland as far as they can go before beachgrass laces them down for now. It gets to be spring, I keep walking, it gets to be summer. Families loll. Now the waves are small; they keep their swash marks close to home. A little inland from the spurge and sea-rockets my tan sons kick a soccer ball north, against grains that may once have been compacted to sandstone, then broken back to grains, bumbling and driven and free again, shrinking along the broadening edge.
