UNDER THE PIER

1 7 R U N D E R T H E P I E R C A R O L E B E R N S T E I N A watery living room, filled up again and again by breakers sloshing the pilings. You could go closer, will you be trapped? Your poor pink feet would be stranded sea creatures. Lacy barnacles encrust the roof-beams. It’s your Elaine’s Haunted Dinner Theatre like the real one playing up the street. The shells are all broken. Their inhabitants dead, presumably. The rocks, pounded into sand. This water could make your tongue swell and close o√ your throat. Keep a safe distance. Keep distancing yourself. Slug-chug of the pulling-away water, hospital pump dragging fluids into veins, into brains. The particulars of your passing: not yet known. The ocean keeps pulling into the room, water eye-level, less, more, lower, higher, waiting in store, narrowing the possibilities. Hot smell of sunscraped rock. Thirst. You keep coming back to the one place of shadow, as if it will help, as if you’ll never be taken with this scene, burned, scraped, shaken. Fluorescent corridors. Your two feet side by side. The pilings line the hallway of the sky. ...