Southern Rhode Island Coast

I swear I didn't sleep last night.

I realized the other day that the cadence most natural in the poetry I write resembles the rhythm of a children's book or a nursery rhyme,

Lying on my back on the sand today, reading T. S. Elliot and Kierkegaard, groping for a political philosophy, and then stretching out beneath slumber, all my thoughts in fragments still,

The ocean and the continuity of self. Learning that it helps my later self, in some ways, to force out a record of days, even if my words have no artistry, even if I can't finish or properly punctuate sentences,

Here at a side beach, enclosed by stone jetties, watching the Block Island Ferry, a tall white layer cake with frosting windows, floating back and forth on a string, jelly flags whipping. High blue sky, gulls (sky rats), fishing boats crawling below, and kite surfers cutting in angles and spitting white foam. Houses, stretching out along the arm of horizon, shingled, grey,

All of my words, always the same,

The ocean, rolling, like Ecclesiastes, and me watching, groping after words (vanity, vanity),

I can't match the things I've read, Fitzgerald's blue ocean of promise denied, Camus' boiling Algerian Sea, Warren's muddy Louisiana Bay, somehow still inviting to Anne and Jack, with space to float and sky, sky, and grey and slate and storm and cloud,

I can see, more than imagine, Sylvia Plath's Cape Cod, where she nannied and slept in the sun, pressing her brown body into a heated jetty stone, pulling periwinkles off the rocks, and the green brine of low tide, and cleansing wind regardless, and the way the salt stays in your hair all night

For Jamie--

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with summer."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

when the passing days finally acknowledge me

Will I awake, half sunk into summer, fingering new lines etched into my skin by nights and days that have passed me, unremembering?

I'm writing this now in the maytime heat - my writing wrinkling beneath the moisture of my hand, the words quivering as I rest the journal on the vibrating steering wheel, my foot squeezing hard the break, hoping for another red light on Division Street so--

I can finish this sentence.

I cannot live without thought, but I am, rising and dressing and driving and eating beneath a thick film of necessity and reaction. There is so much today and especially these days that I want to feel - but my nerves are all worn off, threadbare velvet, no longer plush or soft to the touch. My words have no grip, no conviction, they slide off the present--

And it rolls away as the odometer climbs and the gas needle sinks and I sometimes have thoughts while I am driving about how blue the sky is, or the space between the high clouds, or how all the leaves have opened now and hang down over the road verdant and spread, even on the hesitant oaks. My hand swills the humid air, fingers spread or closed, reaching out the open window to touch the day.

I am seeing this all through the sepia-tint of the hideous glasses I purchased last week. All of this yellowing with passing, the sunlight falling at the particular angle which becomes the things that have already ended.