Channeling El Bardo, Marvelous, Howard as sun sets over water on East Coast

Letter from a reader:

I greatly enjoyed your column in the Register Citizen this morning. My husband and I used to spend some time at the Cape out near Wellfleet with our bikes and would stop by the Bay side of Eastham now and again, as well as in Provincetown. I didn’t realize that it was “one of the few places on the East Coast where the sun sets over the water.”

I remember one year our Pastor and his wife were out there observing the sunset with other nature lovers and it was apparently such a spectacular sight that after the sun dipped below the water the crowd of people on the beach broke into spontaneous applause! Isn’t that a grand memory?!

Thanks for reminding me of their awe and wonder at that simple occurrence that is available to us everyday if only we would stop and look.

Cool Justice column:
Walking where El Bardo and other giants walked, I find peace and purpose

It was Leo Connellan who dispatched me to a certain spot in North Truro, not far from the Provincetown line, nearly 30 years ago.

“Go see Jane and Ralph,” Connellan said. Tell them ‘El Bardo’ sent you.”

I had driven many times on Shore Road by this bayside cluster of small houses and cottages and rows of motels without stopping. I’ve been stopping there ever since the late El Bardo, a former Connecticut Poet Laureate, gave me the heads up.

It’s a place where time is suspended. The tide on the bay goes out farther than the length of a football field, revealing long sandbars and soft muck that is home to sea creatures like hermit crabs.

It’s one of the few places on the East Coast where the sun sets over the water.

“The sun falls into the sea in Provincetown like an invisible big/

hand dipping, rinsing a plate … up the Moon!”

This is Connellan’s view of the Provincetown sunset in the title poem “Provincetown,” from his volume “Provincetown and Other Poems,” published by Curbstone Press of Willimantic in 1995.

And then, Connellan reports,

“Night’s needle suddenly pricks sun’s whole yellow ball /

across all wide sky so pink ocean is dark /

next to it … ”

Complete column at Register Citizen

Also at:

New Haven Register

Middletown Press

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