Reluctant to See the Sun Go Down

I am reading a novel on Stinson Beach, written by a guy I knew in graduate school, a poet who has won many awards, married to a more famous poet who died recently. The book is small, which is why I checked it out of the library to bring to the beach, and it reads like a poet wrote it, less like a novel, more like poems with characters and a plot. Even though the author has switched genders and the grieving person in the book is female while the dead one is male, I can feel that this is how the author is managing his grief, giving it words in a new form that is not his usual approach.

~story excerpt~