D. L. Emblen's "Foot of Grand Avenue" begins with a map and ends with a towel. In between, it performs a quiet trick: it takes the whole sprawling, restless history of a country and funnels it down one street, then dissolves that street into a patch of warm beach where two people lie still. The poem is about how a private moment of peace can sit at the end of enormous, noisy motion without being swallowed by it, and how stillness, for a little while, can feel larger than everything that has led up to it.
The opening stanza gives the street an origin story that is really a list of America. Grand Avenue "emerges from the vast expanse of continent," pulling in "mountain pass or flat plateau or narrow dried-up river-bed," Texas, the Dakotas, Philadelphia, "rutted Georgia roads" and "shining, twin-streaked railroad tracks." The long, breathless lines mimic the sprawl they describe; the sentence barely pauses for breath, just as the continent barely pauses for borders. Then comes the sharpest line of the section: the people are "too far apart to know each other, and living too close together for tolerance." Emblen packs a whole social diagnosis into one balanced, slightly bitter phrase.
The second stanza turns the street into a traffic jam of time. Cars and "slow-moving memories" share the road with "racing, honking ambitions that rely upon their horns rather than their brakes for safety." That joke has teeth: ambition, the poem implies, announces itself loudly instead of slowing down. Then the poem lets in something stranger: "strange, disrupting beasts of fantasy and heritage that keep trotting diagonally across the way." The word "diagonally" is wonderful. Everything else on the avenue runs along it; the myths and inherited stories cut across, refusing to obey the flow of traffic. Modern life, here, is not just machines but a crowded mixture of past and imagination.
What follows is the poem's most surprising move. The dust kicked up by all this "animated history" doesn't choke the speakers' house; it "descends upon our house in soft protective layers, like the fragile moss that sheathes grey boulders from the surf-wash." The simile reverses our expectations. Dust is usually a nuisance, but here it is gentle, even sheltering, and the comparison to moss softens the hard grey boulders of the house against the sea. History becomes a kind of insulation. The speakers are not escaping the country's noise; they are cushioned by its residue.
The fourth stanza sets the speakers walking "bare-footed to the beach" straight down the middle of the road, ignoring "houses and half-houses passing by on wheels" and "the loud vehicular roar of contemporary fear." The image of houses on wheels is comic and slightly unsettling, a world so mobile that even homes are on the move. Against it, bare feet and a casual stroll down the centre of the road become a small act of defiance. The phrase "contemporary fear" names what the roar really is: not just engines, but anxiety.
The ending slows everything down. At "the foot of Grand," the verbs soften and the sentences grow calmer: sun-warmed sand, "summer wind," two people with "heads together on one towel, turned seaward." Even the sounds are changed, now "pastel," a lovely word for noise that has lost its edges. The final image is the poem's boldest. The feeling of warmth and moving air is "a feeling of infinity, where space and time are a pair of sand-fleas hopping in the miniature dunes." After a stanza of continental scale, the poem shrinks space and time to insects in the sand, and the effect is oddly comforting. The huge abstractions that hurried down Grand Avenue are reduced to something playful, something you could brush off a towel.
The poem is written in free verse, with no rhyme scheme and lines that stretch and contract according to need. The long, list-heavy lines of the first half pile up like traffic, while the final stanza's shorter phrases let the reader settle. That shift in rhythm does the poem's thinking for it. Its significance lies in this: it doesn't deny the noise, the fear, or the crowding of modern life, but it proposes that a small, shared, barefoot pause at the edge of the sea can hold more room than the whole avenue.