June 25, 1977

Snow. Fire. Waves. The three hypnotists. Perhaps it is the incessant motion of each that keeps us staring or the deceptive domesticity (campfire; greeting card) beyond which, biding its time, waits danger. Now it's the waves I watch: at Sconset, at Madaket, at Surfside. I think I have been seduced by an island. Not that I haven't felt the same way about landscape before, but usually my choice is more original: an obscure patch of woods crowded with laurel, the view of the Kensico Reservoir at the spot where Route 22 curves due north, a tidal pond on the back side of Bethany Beach. We came to Nantucket Island by pure accident, when a few days we had to fill in New England after a scientific meeting coincided with a copy of "Moby Dick" left carelessly on the floor the night we made our plans. Nantucket: beloved of tourists and natives, photographers and youth hostelers, travel agents, bird watchers, fishermen, conservationists and of just about everyone who sets foot here. I might as well have fallen for a rock star. I even like these cobblestones, as treacherous as they are picturesque. And the two overweight men I am watching from my window in their cranberry colored pants embroidered with tiny whales make me smile instead of scoff, as if a totally charming circus act is being staged just for my benefit. The ocean, which is everywhere here, a bicycle ride away in any direction, is already making all its old claims. My eyes stray to the local newspaper, the Nantucket Inquirer Mirror, top-heavy with real estate ads. "House With Ocean View." I have sworn we will never buy or build another house. Ira, who is sorting through old fishing gear, looks up, and I smile at him in guilt and innocent foreboding.

*Linda Pastan's ninth book of poems, An Early Afterlife, was published by Norton in 1995. She was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995.