I Came To Truro

I Came To Truro

to quit smoking, to trade the noise from the
Brooklyn in my head for the post-tourist
calm, to feel the salted cold in my bones.
I eat raisins, carrots and crackers with
cheese as I sit at a small desk tiled

like a section of bathroom floor, until
the light of morning raises my curtains.
When I step outside I am a creature
of wool. The wind takes the thoughts I'd begun
to digest and scatters them across the

sand road. The ocean seems like a machine
that spits up spindly crabs like toy tables
upturned on the sand. I sit with coffee
and gloves that smell faintly of turpentine
and watch groups of gulls mass first on the beach,

and then spiral upwards, calling, before
heading north along the shoreline, writing
themselves across clouds like India ink.
Two dogs follow at a respectable
distance, pausing when I pause to pick up

a stone or inspect bones for a clue as
to their origin. A scarred dolphin lay
dead on the beach, eye eaten out, numbers
scrawled across its back and I think about how
efficiently we follow disasters

with categories, which is useful to
answer questions that lead to more questions,
but not the answers that matter. When I
turn back the dogs are gone. I am still there,
even though my footprints have been taken.