I didn't assemble these little cairns or rocky sculptures, but I did enjoy taking their whimsical picture this morning on the beach. A friend comments on Instagram: perhaps mermaids came ashore and stacked them up while the world of human beings slept last night. Yes, I like this fanciful idea that mysterious sea creatures step ashore at night and play under the moon while we sleep, so we may wake to find, not just a deserted beach, but a place of whimsy and wonder.

Digging around the Internet I found this Franz Wright poem, from his Pulitzer Prize winning book, 2004, "Walking to Martha's Vineyard." It's a dark poem I want to think about awhile. Franz is the son of the poet James Wright. This poem was published in The New Yorker in 2002. Standing in the breeze of Vineyard Sound at Great Rock Bight, in the company of stacked rocks and yarrow wild, in bloom, in sand dunes, I feel like I might begin to understand something about what this poem is saying, "if I am on an island, how is it they go on forever"

All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar 2018 unless otherwise attributed