Water, water everywhere, but whose water -
Who stole it?
Is it always low tide, or blank tide -

Where the water’s run off like a tidal wave is coming,
 But none does, and I’m left with hard, hot dry sand
And the Sun laughs at me for hoping to swim,
To be cleaned or cleansed.

Ha, he says, get back in your hole,
Go back underground where you belong, Parker -
Of you we’ve no need - comprende?

But Sun’s heat, his rage,
Can’t last the whole day -
By evening he’s worn out,
Tired of punishing people,
Tired of making people sweat and swear,
Turn-burning their skin cherry-crab red -

By day’s end the Sun is just as tired as we are,
And he only complains a little
About having to wait the whole night long
Before getting his chance to scorch us once more.

He’d grumble, too,
About wasting a perfectly good sunset on the likes of us,
Except he has someone waiting for him,
Someone a lot kinder than he is,
To spend the night with.
                        

In my life I’ve known women who made clear
Their total willingness to take up with married men,
Consequences be damned -
the three-and-thirty management consultant at the top of her game,
Pulling down well more than six figures, running her firm,
Only too ready to sleep with her subordinate -
the short-skirted, bare-bloused finance specialist who,
Lips licked and locked on lollipop, 
Makes strong sexual suggestion with sidewise stare
To the man she’s just met -
And if I could, I would judge or Judge these women -
Marriage should be honored - that’s why I wear the ring -
 
And yet Woman comes to me and says,
David - you have no idea -
All these nights alone in my big bed in my huge, empty house,
Pining and praying for a man to share my life with -
You have someone - 
Do you remember what it is like to have no one
Who cares whether you live or die?
 
Woman says, The clock’s ticking, I want to be married,
I want to have children,
And I see it all going up in smoke, right before my eyes -
 
And I think of my mother, gone now,
Forever disappointed in my father, who every day for fifty years 
withdrew after dinner to his den and stayed there -
A man who neither cooked nor cleaned nor spent time
With his children, who just wanted to be alone and was -
 
Rest in peace, Miriam.