The Sun-Warmed Surface
Jan 4 2009


We sit
on folding chairs
on soft white sand,
watching waves roll in.
Watching crabs scuttle
on the inter-tidal flats,
and hardy clumps
of coarse green grass.
And watching a sinking sun
boil-up
in ferocious reds and yellows,
enormous
when it comes so close to earth.

But I no longer swim,
timing my stroke to the swell
taking air in the troughs
saving my breath.
Too dangerous
because there’s an undertow
— the deceptive beauty
of the sun-warmed surface,
concealing what runs below.
I know a man cannot fight the ocean.
I know to swim parallel to shore
let the current take me
until it lets go.
Because it’s not the undertow that pulls you under,
it’s the exhaustion that does.

But it caught me once,
which is more than enough.
So now, I refuse to touch this water
I’ve known since I was young —
here, where I was born
where I grew up.

Instead, like old men, we sit and watch,
turning brown and hard in the sun.