music that has never ended

Here is the Last Stop variety store
where you worked your first job unpacking boxes.
Here is the beach where you juggled rocks
and chipped your front tooth. Overlooking bright water,
the yellow house your family loved and had to sell.
The sandy lovers’ lane where you first tasted salt
from a woman’s skin with the windows wide,
open. Eight years of stories that you told as we drove
tangled roads in your black Jetta, kayaks on the roof.
As we walked every beach on Cape Ann,
paddled the pulsing harbor and bays,
married on a rock overlooking the raw sea.
But this turbulent force, this blue that is not blue
nor green but sliding, rolling, slipping over itself endlessly
in its rush toward rock and sand, these cascading
layers of sound—the roar, the whisper, the crashing—music
that has never ended, that has existed since the beginning
of time—this is no longer your story.
Or ours. Or mine. I stand
at the edge of the surf,
cold wind sobering my vision,
staring into this rare sea, loving this face of God—knowing
this may be the last
I see of her—as if for the first time.