Looking for The Gulf Motel

Some Days the Sea

77 Some Days the Sea The sea is never the same twice. Today the waves open their lions’ mouths hungry for the shore, and I feel the earth helpless. Some days their foamy edges are lace at my feet, the sea a sheet of green silk. Sometimes the shore brings souvenirs from a storm, I sift spoils of sea grass: find a broken finger of coral, a torn fan, examine a sponge’s hollow throat, watch a man-of-war die a sapphire in the sand. Some days there’s nothing but sand quiet as snow, I walk, eyes on the wind sometimes laden with silver-tasting salt, sometimes still as the sun. Some days the sun is a dollop of honey and raining light on the sea glinting diamond dust, sometimes there are only clouds, clouds— sometimes solid as continents drifting across the sky, other times wispy, white roses that swirl into tigers, into cathedrals, into hands, and I remember some days I’m still a boy on this beach, wanting to catch a seagull, cup a tiny silver fish, build a perfect sand castle. Some days I am a teenager blind to death even as I watch waves seep into nothingness. Most days I’m a man tired of being a man, sleeping in the care of dusk’s slanted light, or a man 78 scared of being a man, seeing some god in the moonlight streaming over the sea. Some days I imagine myself walking this shore with feet as worn as driftwood, old and afraid of my body. Someday, I suppose I’ll return someplace like waves trickling through the sand, back to sea without any memory of being, but if I could choose eternity, it would be here: aging with the moon, enduring in the space between every grain of sand, in the cusp of every wave and every seashell’s hollow. ...