The waterline's heaped with crablegs,
soft and bloated flesh fingers
washed ashore like blanched jellyfish,
a letdown, since everyone here has come
for the ceremony of the sun,
the shellers, the beachcombers,
the Koreans whose daughter
trudges the sand in pink crocs,
the Euro tourists with their cameras
and sandals, young Russian girls sporting
baby fat in bikinis, their atheist parents
smoking filterless cigarettes,
fat babies scrabbling in the gray foam,
the grandmothers snoring in beach chairs.
The gulf is calm. Like a shimmering sheen.
As if molten, where no one swims.
It is a holy day, after all,
so there's no washing away of sins
among the weenies roasting
on sticks, joggers and oiled oiled-up
weightlifters posing in vainglorious
thong magnificence!
Christmas. Last night the old miracle
played out again -- lying in the hammock
and swaying in the darkness, looking
up at the stars, waiting for something
beyond the nattering pelicans
in the palm grove. What was it?
Did we expect another miracle?
A new constellation? A new myth?
We could not read the sky except
for its unrelenting, its insistence,
its seeming absence, now, sprawled
above the silica and quartz
and feldspar washed up from the world's
constant heaving, I am wondering
the age-old question, Who are you?
Who have you been? and When will you
know?
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