The old woman in the blue hat supplies the poem's title and its only piece of direct advice, and she delivers it laughing: "Watch out for every third wave." It sounds like beach wisdom, a tip for keeping your sandals dry. Then the next wave does nearly knock the speaker over, and the line begins to look like a warning about life. The poem is about a long marriage or partnership that has weathered loss and now faces illness, and about the stubborn wish, in the speaker's words, "for our walk to go on."
The poem builds its feeling through quiet accumulation. In the opening it notes a golden cliff over grey water, and the colour contrast already hints at brightness set against something heavier. Then comes the beach debris: "oil cans, buckets, ropes, / lobster claws, seaweeds, the carcass of a seal." The list mixes human leftovers with natural ones, and the seal's carcass slips death into the inventory without comment. Out of this wreckage the speaker picks "a new walking stick," so the first image of renewal comes from what the sea has thrown away. The old stick "was buried with the old dog," a detail that sits right beside the son leaving for Colorado. Two kinds of departure, one final and one ordinary, are set side by side in a single flat sentence.
That flatness is the poem's main technique. It is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre, but it is held in tidy two-line stanzas that feel like footsteps, paired and even. Sentences keep spilling over the line and stanza breaks, as when "The old one / was buried," so the poem moves as if it were walking without stopping. The speaker's tone is plain and conversational ("God knows where," "We two have since learned"), and that makes the frank phrases land harder: "when to make love, when to sleep alone." There is no sentimentality here. Closeness is described as something learned, even rehearsed, with "the rhythms of silence and talk."
The break in the poem comes with the wave. "The next one nearly / knocked me off my feet. I sat" ends the stanza on the word "sat," and the next stanza opens with "beside you in that recovery room." The poem gives no transition from beach to hospital. The speaker is dropped from one place into the other, which is how the shock of bad news feels. The poem never says what the illness is, or even whose it is beyond the "you" in the bed. Judging by the setting, the partner is the patient, but the poem leaves the details out and keeps its attention on the waiting. The dash in "wanting one thing–" cuts the sentence short, as if everything else the speaker might want has fallen away.
The last two stanzas bring back the old woman, and her gesture changes meaning. She was "waving over our heads to an old / man coming along behind us with a dog." On the beach it looked like a stranger's friendly greeting. Remembered in the recovery room, it reads as a handing-on: another elderly walker, another dog, the whole cycle coming around again behind the couple. The dog also echoes the one that was buried, and the walking stick, found among the driftwood, now seems a small piece of good luck. The couple are not the only ones on the shore, and they are not the first.
The ending, "you and I kept walking, / double prints along the hard wet sand," is carefully balanced. The past tense says they kept going, while the earlier line about wanting the walk to continue suggests this may be hope as much as fact. The "double prints" are a lovely, concrete picture of partnership, two sets of marks side by side. But the poem has already mentioned the "rising tide," and prints on wet sand do not last. That impermanence is not stated, and it doesn't need to be.
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. It never announces a lesson about mortality, only an old woman's offhand tip. The revision date after the 1999 original suggests the poem was reworked over time, though the text alone cannot tell us why. What it offers is a model of how to face the third wave: with attention, with company, and with the next step.