Rhode Island
By William Meredith
Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over
again, like the rented animals in Aïda.
In the late morning the land breeze
turns and now the extras are driving
all the white elephants the other way.
What language are the children shouting in?
He is lying on the beach listening.
The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels.
He tries to remember snow noise.
Would powder snow ping like that?
But you don't lie with your ear to powder snow.
Why doesn't the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?
He tries to remember snow, his season.
The mind is in charge of things then.
Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic,
all that openness and swaying.
No matter how often you make love
in August you're always aware of genitalia,
your own and the half-naked others'.
Even with the gracefulest bathers
you're aware of their kinship with porpoises,
mammals disporting themselves in a blue element,
smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard
watches himself awhile, like a blue movie.
In the other hemisphere now people
are standing up, at work at their easels.
There they think about love at night
when they take off their serious clothes
and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets.
Today the children, his own among them,
are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese,
using the colonial dialect of Brazil.
It is just as well, they have all been changed
into small shrill marginal animals,
he would not want to understand them again
until after Labor Day. He just lays there.
This is the beach with the amazing red seaweed full of little crawly things.
Brenton Point State Park, where the seaweed is of the thicker green variety and there's more kelp.
While Easton Beach is sandy and has mostly large clam shells and big crabs washed up, Brenton Point has tidepools with lots of little snails and crustaceans.
Spot the birds in this picture.
Most of the gulls and terns prefer the isolated rocks people can't get to.
What's an island without a bridge and a lighthouse?
Related (I lied),
1. What is your favorite summer activity?
Swimming in the ocean.
2. What was one great thing you did this summer?
Went sailing on a clipper ship.
3. When you were a child, what was your favorite summer activity?
Walking on the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach.
4. What has been your favorite summer vacation?
I don't know if I can choose among two trips to Maine and two trips to Yellowstone.
5. Summer goes well into September, but when do you feel like it is over?
When school has started; that's still my dividing point. It used to be Labor Day, but school never started before Labor Day in my childhood.
Given the amount of press the outright lies by Republicans about John Kerry's Vietnam record have gotten, why is this story not being reported everywhere? Why is Bush allowed to lie and lie and get almost no mainstream news coverage for it?
In other news, we went to the back to school pot luck, where there were four hundred different kinds of noodle dishes and other carbohydrates, and my laptop's case is fixed but the single USB port is not, and since the single USB port is on the motherboard and the whole thing will need to be replaced to get one that works, we are definitely talking more money than it's worth. Sigh.
What kind of luck have people had with compact flash vs. secure digital media for storage? Those SD cards look so flimsy but they're so inexpensive! Is it worth getting one of those little flash drives for storing pictures while traveling in case of another CD-RW crisis?
And gacked from various and sundry, though I would never call Remus "Remy" and Snape would spank me if I called him "Sev":
Severus Snape + Remus Lupin
Which Harry Potter Slash Ship Do You Sail On?
brought to you by Quizilla
No comments:
Post a Comment