We spent days in mist. Ocean dust.
My hair looked like a $90 job. A 10 rating.
I was training myself to walk backwards, parallel to the shore without looking behind or falling in. All core, hope, imagination, determination.
Seagulls crested in unison; scattering sporadically like the response to a secret boom or big bear sneeze; returning to formation like an answer to lots of questions unasked.
You’d rolled up your pants and still got soaked, just like every time we’d come before
Submitting our tarnished souls
To our repetitive salt water baptism.
In the small beach-town little matted dogs’d do erratic dances behind worn, corroded fences of tetanus-threatening rust. Do not touch. Beware of dog.
They’d bark their heads off ruthless, and untrustworthy.
4 legged Napoleons. Land piranhas.
My mutt wasn’t having it.
Beneath the bridge connecting coastal access to sleepy commerce center, congregated the bums, whoopin’ and slipping around, catching alarmed crawdads, drinking Old Grand Dad, having a helluvatime.
It’s important to share booze with strangers. The spirits encircle. Your lips are the same lips. Kiss purified by alcohol, don’t fret and the more road-wary the better. They give you pause and ease your mind with uncharted thoughts, though I’d nonetheless really liked to have spared the crawdad.
A furtive pocket-full of notes I fumbled to extract a poet’s name to match our moment to their word-song. Income the spirit of Mary Oliver as the breeze picked up, whispering wild and precious, wild and precious, wild and precious life, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life… knocking cattail’s hollow sound and grass-scratch blades joining in.
Everything is coated in a filmy dew of sea and the world there feels small and briny; the longshore men sure look longingly back from a decent woman and forth to the empty possible space aboard their barnacle-scraped boats. What man you walkin’ with? Don’t see none.
One can fantasize right quick about sending off to another land with warmer breezes and new poets to ponder. Making love in the hull with inescapable sand inbetween the buns, hun. Clams for currency. Hundreds of nautical miles.
But the breeze- a melody of crashing waves and the maritime’s half-full loneliness all surf-stretched, and you’re simply incapable of good decision making in wet dungarees, so on we shuffled through the sand and kept watch of the birds.
Pigeon Heart Ponderings 