State Park I, and: State Park II, and: State Park III

State Park I

    going goingwhile here the words flow(forth a negligible horizon)to where you are hardat witnessing the cornerevent (having borneyourself over the dunes,the reader, to happen it so)

State Park II

Glad for the firesomeone staked down the beach, glad I’m not left alonewith the fullyopened red moon

The stoker has taken onthe burden of responseto the moon which demands a mirror

which is raking the water and tindersthe frame    but whose trail over waves persuadesonly backto the stance of an obdurate shadow

State Park III

Doors slamming inside the surf:we brought our chairs downto hear

    This coincidence, I said,    of furniture

Installedin a folding, my chairlent its prettiest, yellow notesto the beach origami (a skilledimitation of wings)

    A sandpiper lent out yellow notes too

In Phoenix, my mother-in-lawkept folding the clouds up in boxes,a gesture toward “ideas of order”

    Well we’ll never see those again,    I began        Did you know, she had said,    we used to watch the radio?

            Everyone knows about that—here the waves are dragging inexhibits of distance, whorlingsensitive dials,making old-timey noises of farce and capsizement

    I’m also reminded, I said,    of a large, prosthetic ear,

        those big listening trumpets with vanishing points—

    Did they used to shout ‘back’ at the radio?

(Sometimes I yell ‘into Skype’and ‘answer’ passing strangers ‘on Bluetooth’—

    (Did our grandparents feartheir sinking by radio? Rearranging,as they were, the deck chairs on the wreck?)

There stands death, Rilke said,

a bluish liquid—waterdoor flinging wide

& banging on the hinge of the beach

There’s another one smashedon another, I said, getting sleepy,

through parted lips of the waves