Poems by Adeline Carrie Koscher

Learning to Live with Water

by Adeline Carrie Koscher

From Canary Spring 2019

Carrie lives in the Cape Cod Watershed on Seymour Pond where, in the winter months, there are more turkeys in her neighborhood than people.

Spring finds last year’s fire road
winter-crumpled into the ocean.
On the radio,
the geology professor says:

we can have buildings or
we can have beaches; we cannot have both.

I walk to the cliff-edge – crane
over the ocean’s bitemark,
to see the scar –
I measure, how much, how far,
but cannot fathom what is gone.
A flight of swallows swoops and dances
in the space that was sand.

I want it back:
yesterday, the fire road; I want
sunsets and seals; I want
wild lilies in the woods; I want
to walk along the precipice,
to balance on the edge
of earth and sea, now
and then; I want to hold –
in the cup of my mouth –
the sun and the moon and the summer
and my breath forever, but
the ocean has other plans.

Protecting the seashore has left
a dynamic coastline, the professor says.

I bring you to see: the scrub pine torn
from the edge, tossed into the sand
like a bone sucked clean of flesh,
a fishbone or a wishbone – snapped
between two hands – which one is lucky?

In their natural state,
dunes and shorelines come and go.

The professor says, the shoreline
is supposed to change, erode, evolve.
That very shoreline – the one that attracted us –
must vanish in order to exist.

We have two choices: he says,
let the water in or try to keep it out.

We are drawn to magenta cloud, jet sea;
moontide and riptide transform us,
reshape us. We cling to a shoreline
crumbling in our hands.

Learning to live with water,
there is a dawning.

Everything, everything is ephemeral –
everything closes, empties, evaporates.
Laughter fades into silence.
Light into darkness.
Even darkness, given time,
disappears.