Cape Cod
We were welling up at the proximity. The fog
lifted and birds showed us the way. Fins, black,
breach after breach and the left side of a tail, twice.
The fog rolls around the Cape, giving the horizon
and taking it back. I’d be here either way,
looking out to sea, my eyes stumbling each time
over a sand bar. I stuck my hand in the ocean,
wondering how anything could survive this substance.
We find where the boats first landed, bad weather driving them
too far north, the stars shining uselessly behind the clouds.
I remember how I would navigate by the hemispheres
of your freckled shoulders, counting each sepia star
with the tip of a finger. The fog rolls so fast we almost
lose sight. Our time is thinning to a point,
but here there is a sense of something being built,
a plan still being formed.
Jamie Baxter is 27 and lives in London after graduating from Durham University where he studied engineering. He has had poems published by The Next Review, The Literateur and Astronaut. He also attended a Tower Poetry School.
The Kindling 