Yesterday was mostly foggy and drizzly and thus a gorgeous day for clambering mysteriously among the stones of Great Head, a round granite peninsula that thrusts into the open Atlantic. The trees have not yet started to leaf out, so the deciduous groves are stark and bare. All color arises from the stumpy pines that cling to the wind-raked rock, from the lichen that stars the stone, from the variegated stone itself, and from the wrinkled sea, whose hue shifts from a Caribbean green, to slate, to gray, to almost white.

We saw eiders and buffleheads, loons and mergansers, bobbing and diving in the frigid waters. In the tide pools we saw snails and tiny shrimp-like swimmers and lurid algae the shade of antifreeze. Our ears were filled with the roar of water against rock, with the squeals of gulls, and with the poignant dripping chime of a bell-buoy in the shipping channel. 

Today, eventually, we'll head inland, away from the sea and into the forests of the homeland. For now I am sitting in front of a warming woodstove, drinking coffee from a cup labeled "Ernie," listening to a gull cry, watching the fog drift over the quiet tide-shifting cove. I've been reading a book about New York City, which feels very far away at the moment, perhaps an imaginary place, like Atlantis or Arden; perhaps it only exists in ancient poems, the Ed Koch Fragments, the Peter Stuyvesant Ballads, the Epic of Frank O'Hara.