Pea Island

The mind doesn’t go where you want it to. Slovenly, lulled by baked breezes Limbs sodden, limp vegetables in an oven Thoughts slump diagonal Glassy waves churn pastel Warm, frothy bath suds Bleached sand scummy with cordgrass, shell shards, cigarette stubs Shirtless men battle the sea with fishing poles Tattooed, obese women cradle bare-headed infants who cry and squirm, then collapse on their mothers’ broad, sweating chests A yellow crab ejects itself sideways, suspicious A clawed spy. Black eyes peer as from a submarine’s antennae Terns dive bomb into waves Slim arrows of birds like a white flash of memory Sky, cloudless. Sun irons the sand flat, bleak, colorless A tow-headed boy doodles with his feet gathering black beach tar between small toes We are all equals on the beach. Doctors, plumbers, teenagers Flesh pummeled by the sun’s fierce eye Like pebbles, scraped anonymous by the scour of its tongue

And the churning sea, no docile daughter but a roving boy, impetuous Eternal, yes, but forever chewing away at the clarity of its borders drawing and then erasing division again and again between land and water World’s edge perpetually in upheaval We assail it with shouts, our clamor like gurgles of fish Launch our ships, command it with our blackest iron fleets But its voice dwarfs us and our pitiful machines Its barbaric roar mightier than an organ’s pipes I had wanted to write a poem today. The one I’d been planning The poignant one about motherhood and disappointment But my fingers sweat And want only to pick at my skin Lotion congeals in white clumps mixing with blackened sand on my calves And the only thing that pierces afternoon’s torpor Is a glimpse of the dim, slick backs of dolphins, sliding north.