On the Beach
By Joel Fry
The tide draws conclusions in the night.
I look for a girl walking alone
by the wreckage which steered itself ashore.
Mea culpa wakes among drapes and fluorescent
fires. I am seven dune buggies to a single man
who always asks for more.
Nothing changes in the Latin I remember.
I’m not a child known to vex. Does everything
I recall recall itself in me? When I touch a memory
is it like touching a stone, or does the memory
touch me in return?
I still love. Don’t I?
I’ve been told I need to. I pity my father,
grown old and arthritic, insisting on working
like a poor man. I’ve told him I can’t help
him load furniture any longer. I can’t stand
to take orders from him.
I imagine my mother’s face
a skull in a desert until I have to stop,
until the darkness becomes too heavy
and I want to never think again.
I know I love her.
Whatever washes ashore is made of me.
My thoughts agree once they occur to me.
I concur on all points of appearance,
that death has its green, wooden fingers
that click like clasps, shutting close to the throat
and stopping the windpipe.
We all want the fire in us to burn clear,
where nothing is recorded or lost,
where distance curtains its knell and fists
relax their fury. I am whatever led me
to this ocean, the whisper it reduces,
the silent gaze where nothing returns.
Joel Fry lives in Athens, Alabama. He has had poetry published in Asheville Poetry Review, Off the Coast, The Florida Review and many other places. His first book of poetry is Late Alabama, which is available through Amazon.