Again (Wrightsville Beach)

Crusoe again, confounded, confounding purposes
just cruising, looking around and around
for edges of the familiar, places he was in back then,

wherever—all the old sand and water.
How much he thought to be there, he can't remember.
Shipwreck wouldn't seem thinkable, at least until

after it happened, and then one begins at the edge, the beach,
going forward, backward, until one finds place again.
Oh gosh, there's mother! Or brother, sister, father—some

friend of long-standing, anyone who still is there, can be
securing. Of course, you're—And you look so well!
Even years slip past in the background.

The water, waves, sand, the backdrop of the houses
because it's all been developed—Friday's Diner, Crusoe's Condos—
it's all as it would be, the locals, the tourists,

whoever got here first and what they could make of it.
But the old story is real too, the footprint, the other,
anyone's fears of anyone, the displacement when

for the first time one sees some other is there,
not just imagined, and won't necessarily agree
with anything at all one wants, won't in that sense go away.

Copyright © 2006 Robert Creeley All rights reserved
from Crazyhorse
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission