The Whimbrel’s Bill

The Whimbrel’s Bill

Dune slogging, each step flounders
as if drunk—the earth once seemed
such a sure thing beneath my feet.

Hiking the sand road to the ocean at dawn, 
here, the North Spit, eons ago
was sedimentary rock—so much time

spent gnashing, grinding—what’s left,
just masses of gritty individualists, 
so many hourglasses yet to fill. 

The road is leveed, Corp of Engineers, 
crossing this strip of land, barely sea-level, 
slivered between the bay—dredged

for Asia-bound log ships—and the ocean. 
I pass cattail wetland and flooded willow
thickets teeming with spring warblers. 

But I’m not prepared for the hordes
of mosquitos, swarming like thoughts
around my furrowed brow. I forgot repellent, 

keep slapping myself out of being-in-the-moment.
Arriving, the sea breeze drives them away. I gaze out—
there’s no hurry; let yourself feel the vastness inside you.

There’s no time like the geological. But dammit! 
I can’t swat away the voices—it’s gonna happen
any day now, the Big One, the quake

that’ll trigger a killer tsunami, you’d be a goner.
Nor can I erase what’s written in the wrack-line—
we all are waves, curling over someday, 

somersaulting our last hurrah onto the shore. 
Still, I marvel how perfect the whimbrel’s bill
has evolved for stabbing mole-crabs in the surf.

Born in Detroit, now a long-time resident of Oregon, David Hargreaves is a poet, translator, and linguist. His translation of The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets by Nepal Bhasa poet, Durga Lal Shrestha, was published in 2014, and his translation of Chittadhar Hrḍaya’s “River” appeared in the Everyman’s anthology River Poems in 2022.  His own Running Out of Words for Afterwards was published by Broadstone and listed in Kirkus Review’s top 100 “Indie Press” books of 2022. Other poems can be found in American Journal of Poetry, Passages North, West Trade Review and elsewhere.