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1.
The first space in the parking lot
is empty. When I reach the sweep
of shoreline, I put down my things
and enter: the water is translucent,
temperate. I swim in the soft curl
of a wave, swim steadily, letting the wave
hold me—it can have what I have—
such cold and patient embraces! Time slows
to a swirl, and when I tire my feet touch
bottom—a slow ridge of sand that lifts
perfectly.
2.
A well-built blonde, an iron-pumper,
floats upstream against the tidal wash
of the sun. She wears a thong-bottomed
bikini and pulls the pins from her hair.
Her eyes are vacant or triumphant—I can't
tell which—and her hands hold the bra-top
she has mistaken for a lariat or a live
Tennessee rattler. She exults in her dance,
her almost total nudity, and reaches for the sky,
bends over to adjust her ankles. Her hair
blows in the wind, and I put my book away—
let the old laureate slumber!
3.
Sea wind, blow through me. You know I am
barely here, that the gull who shrieks
his warning over my head is more reliable.
With your salt breath, your trance-deepened
wisdom—you quiet me. Scoured by you, I soften.
I breathe again the first smells of childhood:
the wide ocean of my mother's body, smoke
in my father's hair, and you, wind from the sea,
bearing fresh news of the planet. Your hand on me
now opens my closed-off heart.
Charles Fishman is director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at Farmingdale State University, Associate Editor of The Drunken Boat, and Poetry Editor of New Works Review. His books include Mortal Companions, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and The Death Mazurka, which was selected by the American Library Association as an “Outstanding Book of the Year" (1989) and nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His most recent collections include Country of Memory (Uccelli Press) and 5,000 Bells (Cross-Cultural Communications), both released in 2004, and Chopin’s Piano, which is scheduled for publication in January 2006 by Time Being Books.
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