the fossil record
<<20>>
Ranger's Station, Off Season
Despite the late winter storm
squalling across the tip of Cape Cod
—cold, but now too warm for snow—
I hop at midnight into the borrowed car,
knowing my borrowed home will lose
electricity anyway, and drive silently
through angry wind toward Race Point,
fronting the Atlantic. As I pass the last
of the houses, showers of blue sparks
rain down from strained powerlines.
All light finally gone, my headlights
barely visible through the gales
against the dunes bordering the shore,
tires skidding on the sand-strewn road,
I stop and park beside the abandoned
ranger’s station looming from the weather-
beaten beach like a shipwreck: raw,
two-story New England clapboard—peeling,
unkempt, salt-swept and buckled, somehow
still standing sentry year after year, here
at the outermost thrust, unharbored—
remnant skull-shell whose bone-black
sockets flash with intermittent lightning.
Engine switched off, rainwater swoops
in acrobatic arcs over the car’s moonroof,
as if in inverse imitation of the jagged surf
that leaps repeatedly from the sea.
Why do I fear being washed away,
even while I want to be? I know that it
won’t happen in today’s tamed landscape
of cultivated wilderness, cultivated safety,
though I’m utterly alone, and alone
for miles. I’ll turn the key again,
the motor will start as easily
as always. I’ll idle here in my latent
wish to be again the bare forked animal
that Shakespeare knew we are, and once
reconciled with the ranger’s station’s
empty face and hulking, naked frame,
I’ll return to my darkened house,
light the row of candles that I lined up
earlier on the bedside nightstand,
and wake bundled in the bedcovers
without heat, to the sound of repair trucks
craning outside in the brightness.