Beach Music

At night the moon raced past the windowsill

of the second floor bedroom in Beach Music, our house by the sea.

So unremitting and vain.

The lane trod down the shore, but only followed me.

You went another direction, a direction the stars follow,

always farther into themselves, but not you,

never into you.

Yet when we peered out the shattered pane filled with corpses of insects

who should have lived long and free, we didn’t see the end of the ocean,

like many do, where blue melts into green.

We saw only midnight and the shimmer of stars

on the body of the waves. We didn’t noticed the gulls lazily drifting

over our head, or the sandpipers scouring on the ground,

only the tiny world of the window as we peered out of our cage.

We understand so little, the world doesn’t have a chance to tell

our wandering minds how we should really see the clouds and the sun,

how the waves really roll, and what the water should feel

like as the waves beat us sore.

Where did we find such distance?

How do we lose happiness on the trip home?

What is happiness to the honey bee

with the taint of morning glories

still glued to his fur?

That night, the moon raced the world to see if it could make it home

before we did. Before we found a way to cancel it out again.

The world of windowsill bodies stands in Beach Music

on the second floor in the salmon room where together

we understood the world of mosquitoes that drink to nature’s health,

ladybugs who remain two sided and dream,

and spiders weaving stars into their seams.