Writers’ Weir: The Body in the Dunes

Published 8:00 am Wednesday, October 26, 2016

The blades of beach grass murmured like animated

ideograms to tell us why, compass needles to tell us where,

the hands of clocks to tell us when—things we could read

if only we knew how.

Or knives.

Buried under the beach grass of the dunes near Truro

was a body. It rose up on the sand pile like a joke:

The forgotten sunbather, fallen asleep and left behind,

slumbering as the summer wound down

and waking now ready for Halloween.

As the wind erased the trails the summer had inscribed in sand,

the scattered facts emerged of what no one knew had happened.

A body or, rather, bones—bleached white, broken, black with mold.

Here and in Boston the newspapers murmured too in black and white:

a murder, some random clues forever leading nowhere,

and suspects only those conjecture could discover, one whose passion

lusted more for this woman dead than living.

Sure it was some tourist, the locals say, or you’d think he’d know

how the shore gives way under the breakers coming in,

the wind off the Banks, the coast itself worn thin

from the violent storms driven on the current down from Labrador.

Half a century later we still remember what we never knew:

who she was, who did it, why. All we know about what happened

is that it did, and this we learned only by grace of the grass,

its rhizome’s warp and woof, the subterranean script

of stems and roots down deep into and wide

that would have held the looseness of the sand together,

giving the mound some essence against the weather.

The killer as all good killers do undid himself:

the spade that buried the body severed the weave

that would have bound the body where it lay

until it rose up with the rest of us on the sea.

• Jim Hale’s award-winning column, “On Writing,” appears regularly in the Capital City Weekly. This poem was inspired by the real-life case of “The Lady of the Dunes.”

• To submit to Writers’ Weir, email your poetry, fiction or creative nonfiction to managing editor Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.