SUNDAY POETRY: "SHORE SCENE"

My brothers Tim and John and me, with our father sailing behind us, somewhere on Cape Cod a long time ago. Photographed by our mother, Patience.

SHORE SCENE

by John Logan

 

There were bees about. From the start I thought   

The day was apt to hurt. There is a high   

Hill of sand behind the sea and the kids   

Were dropping from the top of it like schools   

Of fish over falls, cracking skulls on skulls.   

I knew the holiday was hot. I saw   

The August sun teeming in the bodies   

Logged along the beach and felt the yearning   

In the brightly covered parts turning each   

To each. For lunch I bit the olive meat:   

A yellow jacket stung me on the tongue.   

I knelt to spoon and suck the healing sea ...

A little girl was digging up canals

With her toes, her arm hanging in a cast   

As white as the belly of a dead fish

Whose dead eye looked at her with me, as she   

Opened her grotesque system to the sea ...

I walked away; now quietly I heard   

A child moaning from a low mound of sand,   

Abandoned by his friend. The child was tricked,   

Trapped upon his knees in a shallow pit.   

(The older ones will say you can get out.)   

I dug him up. His legs would not unbend.   

I lifted him and held him in my arms   

As he wept. Oh I was gnarled as a witch   

Or warlock by his naked weight, was slowed   

In the sand to a thief’s gait. When his strength   

Flowed, he ran, and I rested by the sea ...

A girl was there. I saw her drop her hair,   

Let it fall from the doffed cap to her breasts   

Tanned and swollen over wine red woolen.   

A boy, his body blackened by the sun,   

Rose out of the sand stripping down his limbs   

With graceful hands. He took his gear and walked   

Toward the girl in the brown hair and wine

And then past me; he brushed her with the soft,   

Brilliant monster he lugged into the sea ...   

By this tide I raised a small cairn of stone

Light and smooth and clean, and cast the shadow   

Of a stick in a perfect line along

The sand. My own shadow followed then, until   

I felt the cold swirling at the groin.