Thoreau Goes Out to Fire Island

sail rock
west quoddy head
lubec

Thoreau Goes Out

To Fire Island

Our thoughts are the epochs

in our lives, all else is but a journal

of the winds that blew

while we were here.

                                Henry David Thoreau

When he went out to Fire Island to find his friend

Margaret and her husband and their son, somehow

in the wreck and on the beach everything was absolutely  

clean, the cacophony of debris carried off and off

and off by humanity.  The sea, see, is the only

constant, and her floor and her roof

and the two or three people who lifted

to see the body of her little boy who would be

buried there or nearby, people numb, people

greedy, people plundering from the plundered,

people who watched the ship break and break

against the outer banks who wouldn’t or couldn’t brave

the roils and fists of the waves.  But they waited

for that breaking, the way laid by the hurricane

that lifted the hold to unload with every able body

sea wind every dock-jack wind…by the time he

arrived all the bodies he can find are reduced

to skulls and from the skull a backbone and a part

of a hand…still with a shirt on, a cuff with one

button that he plucks up from the cloth. 

It comes away as easy as a ripe berry, plucked up

and softly rubbed and thumbed and thumbed

months later in his attic in Massachusetts maybe,

and he’s not shocked he’s not shocked at seeing

the too few bodies and the bare sand…maybe

what shocks him most is that he’s not shocked

and all he has between him and his friend

to touch and take away is maybe this little bit

of closure that maybe (he compared it to some

other button on another recovered shirt from a spilled

open trunk, what hadn’t been plundered) belonged

to Margaret’s husband, that the shirt was his

that she must’ve herself touched that button too, undoing

it, undoing her own.  I know Thoreau had read her “Meditations”

and maybe now remembered: 

I sigh, half-charmed, half pained.  My sense is living,

And, taking in this freshened beauty, tells

Its pleasure to the mind…

                                                But the heart

Sends back a hollow echo to the call

Of outward things,---and its once bright companion

Who erst would have answered by a stream

Of life-fraught treasures, thankful to be summoned,--

Can now rouse nothing better than this echo