Morning Idyll on the North Shore

 

Rocky bay at the mouth of the Temperance River

thunderstorms rolled through in the night,

loud and worrisome, though I didn’t

hear any trees coming down nearby.

Some loud thunderclaps,

the kind that go beyond sound into shock.

Heavy rain, of course.

But at 5 a.m. the stars were blazing:

Cassiopeia, Auriga, and the Pleiades,

melded into a fuzzy ball by the still-humid night air.

 

Now Hilary examines the rocks on the beach

beside her camp chair, one by one.

She shows me a few. I give them back,

expressing interest and admiration.

“You should keep that,” I might say.

“Those are agates. Maybe Thompsonite.”

“This one has a red line through it. What’s that?”

“Could be jasper,” I take a wild guess.

 

A sweet, vegetative smell permeates the air,

like rotting wintergreen or Labrador tea.

Four mergansers are drifting at the mouth of the river.

(Not drifting, fishing.)

And two fat gulls fly by.

 

These shelves of rock look like walruses,

struggling to come ashore across the pebbles,

their children: reds and grays,

butterscotch, an occasional green.

Here’s one that’s etched in green foliage.

"Don’t throw it away. I’m going to keep it.”

 

The blue sky advances, like Oklahoma,

but it isn’t getting any warmer.

Now a skein of muted sunlight dances toward us

from the horizon across the waves.