The ribs of the sand felt hard
against the toweled ground
like laying on someone’s
chest, familiar but not quite
known in this raw, exposed place.

The wind kept picking up,
trying to lift the beach and
the surfers and the whales;
the umbrella turned inside out–
metal spikes scratching the sky.

Forehead tipped back towards
the dunes unravelling their skin,
then flung forward towards the seals
that floated along the waves,
bobbing heads like unmarked buoys.

A pack of pale limbs cast soft
shadows along white sand tossing
a ball, tackled each other like falling
fence posts, their scalloped
laughter as familiar as air.

Near the edge of the water, rocks
collected in rows, washed and glistening–
rust-red, singed-salmon, Persian-green–
their colors shifting with the light.

Burnt-skin, seal skin, the smell of
sunscreen as thick as summer or time
without summer that rolls forward, or tilts
backward like the lawn chair no one
can quite manage to set up straight.

Despite the cold, the wind, the white
sea-foam billowing upwards like a snow
drift, we submerge–the scream of bones
knocking against ice and melting slowly
as if time were numb and deaf.

The water always feels like home, or the
absence of home, or that space that hovers
just outside of time where we are water,
thick with the smell of seaweed and salt
as one might imagine the taste of god’s sweat.

The shell of the sun purses its lips as
if saying, “that’s enough for today,” and
we fold ourselves like blankets and chairs
salty and tasseled with seaweed, slipping
seamlessly into the golden husk of ourselves.