I answer, “Beach.” 
”Ah-h-h,” you say, and detail for me 
your painting—broad-brushed layers 
of titanium, cerulean, cobalt; and there 
at the upper edge of white, accent dabs 
of cadmium yellow. I like that vision, too, 
but my senses lap up more.
 
Breathing in the sea, all briny growth, decay, 
digestion, all wooing toward a flash of satisfaction 
enters me. And more than salt, I taste all that, 
my tongue confirming ocean acts (a brew 
beyond my grasp) as well as flesh from shells 
and scales that live again in me.
 
If your seeing is your believing 
(I counter your conviction), 
then my feeling is my knowing. 
Forget the darkening, the film of grit and salt; 
in recognizing the ancient home, my skin salutes 
the animal brain, dismisses land-locked history. 
The skin remembers warmth of sun in shallows, 
the pulse of currents building into air a wet percussion. 
The rocking cradle’s ebb and flow finds answer 
in my veins until—floating conjoined with lullabies
I’ve always known—I am the rhythm. 

Your scene lies quietly on canvas, shrugs and sighs 
with mineral breath, awaits the sterile eye.  But other 
senses grasp the buzzing atoms, commingle in embrace
(this place I love, this body divine in insignificance)
until the sea and all it touches becomes inextricably me.
                        

Don’t ask me why, 
this harvest of moons 
in bright September.
 
Studding the beach like cabochons,
each moon jelly holds a lucky clover 
of pink inside, four horseshoes 
etched in sea glass, fitting amulets
for a being without a brain.
 
All month they glow 
on the shore as you and I 
take our pondering walks
—alone, together, 
or alone together.
 
Beautiful, doomed, they dry in the wind, 
tentacles tangled in foam.
Their vitals afloat in a paperweight dome
 
we peer into, looking for some answer
to be pinned down, held firm
in the clarity of morning light. 
                        

I’m done with tidy v’s of southbound geese,
cursors skimming a screen of sky.
 
All day I’ve watched water birds 
of a different feather, sturdy and brown,
flocked loosely together behind 
a leader with purpose, if not style.
The pelicans manage flight.
 
The ready totes beneath their beaks, 
de-salting glands above their eyes, their size,
these I admire, but I love most the way they fly:
their rising beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, 
then drop and long g l i d e
 
just inches above the sea. The casual u
or sloppy j behind the rushing leader
sails in reckless aviation, wings splayed,
catching surface lift from flashing water.
Oddly, I’m reminded of second grade,
 
of cheerful Mrs. Floyd with swinging jowls, 
teaching us the Virginia Reel, the Grand March, 
filling up the gym with old Victrola tunes 
while we clumsy kids of the 1950s learned to keep 
the beat, to follow leaders at a trusting pace, 
 
something we might later use in some unimagined place,
each time we advanced with signs, banners, or rifles.