—HOW MANY SLAMS IN AN OLD SCREEN DOOR?
On Cisco Beach
for Donna
On Cisco Beach
This house,
still a stranger,
whispers, Relax
whispers, Trust me
though you’ve never
thought to question
a building before.
You press your fingers
against the window
like a lover testing the heat of
a pillowcase or stubbled cheek
and watch the glass pucker coyly.
Outside the waves have
their own conch shell song,
eternity swirling inside the
burnished curl of a horn,
nothing you haven’t heard before,
but nothing you’ve ever
been able to understand either.
Across the road,
sea grass stumbles and re-crosses itself,
drunk in the gusts,
slurring, I’m a little unsteady.
slurring, Walk with me please.
And you want to,
walk, that is,
but this coffee has never tasted
so honest or blunt,
the way solitude can make a person
reassemble their skins and motives.
Against skeins of sepia-colored sand,
the tide thrashes soundlessly
as you did only days ago,
punctual and professorial,
gathering your ugly stitches in a pouch
you primly synched.
But no one’s here now,
or if they are,
they’re not watching.
No one cares,
not even you for once,
so you shed yourself where you stand,
cross the dirt road barefoot,
walk through stalks that clutch your calves,
breezes that tease each hard-earned scar.
You meet the shore halfway,
beaming and sure,
open for anything,
ready to go all the way.
Flotsam
You
are busy
polishing
Cabochons
that
don’t need it,
busy
rewriting the broken
music
of sea shells
cracked
underfoot.
Skyward,
gulls scream
for
pity while the sun
shimmies
behind cloth clouds
no
different than a magician
making
fortune disappear.
The
sand dunes buckle decisively,
their
skin peeling free and sticking
to
your soles like cake batter,
each
grain a speck
of
un-plucked infinity.
On
these very beaches,
which
the waves have trampled for eons,
life
stirs in the flotsam,
driftwood
breastbones buried
at
half-mast under each breached swell,
awaiting
rescue and release
much
like trapped breath or a muffled sigh.
Can
you hear it?
Did
you even notice?
Tide
Pool
This
is how it’s done,
you
floating like light
inside
the cool swirl
of
an aimless tide pool,
you
a girl again,
giddy
and reckless,
thirteen
or thirty
it
doesn’t matter,
your
hair coiled from salt,
thoughts
untangled for once,
feeling
as weightless
as
breath
as
wishes
as
secrets
sewn
into the loose strips of wind.
You
kick at nothing
because
it’s easy
and
fun
because
you can
because
why not,
the
fish don’t care.
In
fact, they swing around now,
mere
school kids themselves,
standing
on fins,
rapt
like voyeurs
before
a stage play
when
the field trip
is
just beginning.
This
is how you
crush
summer
in
your chest
ears
mind
mouth
like
so-sweet fruit,
its
colors jewel-bright
and
radioactive,
shooting
through your toes
like
bolts of pleasure,
bouncing
off underwater boulders,
pinging
off the curled arms
of
a wave that
holds
you buoyant,
body
to body,
a
dance aquatic,
the
two of you
whispering
what only
the
sea can hear.
