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.
