LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth 9/19/97

Poetry

The Summer That Got Away

There’s a broken beach chair propped by the trashcan;
There’s a slight chill in the breeze today.
I’m sitting here— can’t believe it’s September;
This was the summer that got away.

There are at least four feet between every blanket;
Where is everyone on this Labor Day?
Parking’s a cinch— we got in the ocean block;
But this was the summer that got away.

And I don’t know where time could have gone—
Three months squeezed into a few days!
And I just can’t believe we’ll soon be in sweaters;
This was the summer that got away.

There are a few brave souls pretending to enjoy,
Riding the lackluster waves of today.
There are even no planes hawking cheap cocktails;
This was the summer that got away.

There’s a broken beach chair propped by the trashcan;
There’s a slight chill in the breeze today.
I’m sitting here— can’t believe it’s September;
This was the summer that got away.

October—Rehoboth Beach (for Jeb and Ed)

So odd to the mountain man,
all these straight streets ending in sea.
Like gray-green parentheses, the rough
ocean cups continents, booming beyond
the dunes like the bombing of distant cities.
I have come here for the rapport of wreckage,
for the chitter of dry grasses, for the foaming
surf of autumn, to taste the briny tides
between which we met and parted.

The crowds I came in autumn to avoid
have dispersed. Fewer and fewer marring
footprints, all the hedonism in recession,
as all the difficult bliss you brought with summer
dwindles into the history-scrawl of journals.
The lyric of our bodies together, coinciding as sea
and sand sigh along surf-line, replaced by the beauty
of this bleakness, the fine ripples that wind fingers
in solitude along undisturbed dune flanks.

From the world, like a bear I withdraw again,
self-consciously grim and unapproachable in
black boots, leather jacket, redneck cap,
in a toughened melancholy that still
balances uneasily between poetry and pain.
I descend now through all the dry sand bereft
above high-tide line, the dunes only exceptional storms
will saturate, I descend to stand just beyond foam-reach.
Beside all the water toxic to the thirsty, I watch
the restless swell of aquamarine, the ravenous curves
mounting and smashing, hissing back in a sheet of seethe.
Like calls to like, the chemical composition of tears,
seaspray in my beard. Sorrow is a silver chalice
of seawater, a great bowl where all griefs meet.

The wind and sun compete, I cock up my collar,
I ask the sea why I am alone again, what more
I am meant to gain from loss. What I am meant
to keep today, the remnants of armor: an oyster shell
fondled translucent, the violet iridescence of mussels,
a fragment of fallen angel’s wing. What I am meant
to remember, the wavering lines of wings, a mile offshore,
arrow after arrow, flock after flock, heading south.
The black etch of birds, certitudes, vanguard of
the promised chill. Now I dip a finger into foam,
and all the sacramental salt we shared—the silver
seep of chest-hair sweat, the glaze of semen
fusing flesh, beard briny with high tide,
goodbye splashing your lap—all these lost primals,
these sea-seconds like a host I hold again on my tongue.

Jeff Mann/Blacksburg Virginia

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