Cape Cod: A Death

Tonight, my friend reads Swift to her grandmother,
who’s satisfying her final wish to die at home.
The old woman sleeps most of the day, awake nights
ever since the young doctor explained: death is like sleep. 

Her breaths are long and studied; she savors each one,
as if she knew how few remained.
I lean in the doorway of the bedroom listening
to soft voices over mechanical pumps and beeps.

I have nothing to do but read, wait, walk quietly about
a house that hoards the residue of late autumn light,
like sand or salt inside a translucent shell.
Earlier today, I waded through huckleberry over dunes

to Nauset Beach, where a West African freighter
ran aground in last night’s force-nine gale.
Flat to the beach, she settled and creaked, moored to shore
with yellow rope by the local volunteer fire department. 

It reminded me of an illustration from Gulliver’s Travels—
Lilliputians had bound their giant prize
with the burliest cables, and when he awoke, sewn
to the coast of a foreign country, couldn’t budge. 

The tide ebbed and flowed around the ship’s hollow hull, 
with the sound inside a shell when pressed to your ear.
When I learned from the crowd that one of its young sailors
was missing, swept overboard in the midnight storm,

I wanted his death to be as easy as sleep—or believe
he might still be found, smoking a cigarette
in his bunk below deck, listening to the old recordings
of Billie Holiday, Duke Elington and Satchmo

his father had salvaged from before the revolution.