• THE SEA

    NOTE: TODAY’S POST FOLLOWS BELOW: Dear poetry-lovers,           Thank you from the bottom of my heart for following my blog. Some of you have been daily readers since it began 9 years ago, some are more sporadic or more recent followers.  Thank you one and all. As you can imagine, it takes a fair amount…


  • BECAUSE

    The older man walks slowly downthe beach, each foot carefully placedto find a purchase the waves would take away.He shields his eyes from the sun, ignoresthe myriad shells the ocean offers up,does not bother to hear the song of the wavesthat soon will erase all evidenceof his presence here today.He walks along this beach becauseothers…


  • A PAUSE

    They ride the tides ashoreby the thousands and tens of thousandsnesting lightly on the waiting sand.We stroll the beach struggling for a footingfor which they have no need,stopping frequently to pick one up,look at it carefully and if it passesour completely arbitrary test,pocket it for display at home.We watch the gulls, pelicansand osprey ride the…


  • MISSING

    In my dreamI went for a walk alonga boardwalk but therewas no beach to be seen.I came across a little girlsitting, leaning againstthe railing, forlorn woulddescribe her fairly.I took off one of mygray socks, a black seamacross the toe, stuck iton my hand, nowa sock puppet.She smiled so Igave her the sock.She arose and seemedto…


  • CLOSE ENOUGH TO HEAR

    We sit around the small tablesglad to be out of the sunwhose midday glare seemsto blind the drivers slowlyapproaching the Jetty Park lot. A family chatters, the childrenlaughing at nothing, at everything,and nearby a dog lays outdreaming of a good walkand dinner, hoping for scraps. We can hear the waterof the inlet, the waves breakingonto…


  • I HAVE NEVER BEEN

    six foot four with a full headof longish brown hair neatly cut five foot ten as the Air Forceclaimed although I neverconformed to their assumption sitting on the deck of a yachttrying to decide if it wassufficiently large enoughto meet my desires sitting on a beach in Hawaiimy oceanside villamere steps away,the housekeeper beckoningwith a…


  • ON THE BEACH

    It washed up on the beach this morning,stopped right at my feet, as Istared down at it, examining it carefully.It message was clear at first, a taletoo hard to swallow, of creaturestossed about by a storm that no onesaw, from an age in which no onenow alive could have experienced.The message described a magic landof…


  • SEASCAPE

    The shadow of the balloon passes slowly along the water’s edge and onto the beach, its gondola touches the dune as the disk of the sun drowns in the sea. First appeared in Beachfire Gathering, 1999


  • DO NOT FORWARD

    I thought about sending you a postcard, one with the Riviera in the background or from Vieux Nice, with its teeming life, after all, we did have 30 years together. We never came here, I haven’t been back to the places we went together since they, like so much of what we shared, I left…


  • LA MER

    Next week we will walk along the beach and periodically stare out on the ocean. The waves will wash in and out, and one will look much like the last and the next. If we get out early enough, perhaps we will sit outside a café across the road from the beach and drink our…