In the dark, I can see at last.
The tender-tipped light through the curtains
makes hieroglyphs on the wall,
telling of how we clamber to the beach
in the oppressive heat,
and of how the sand is searing,
baking the soles of our toughened feet.
There are so many,
so many voices as we come up
and over the endless path to the shore.
Heads turn begrudgingly as we trudge past.

We smear sunscreen,
the heat beating down on our submissive heads
as though the sky might be hanging its
engorged blue glory two feet above.
I am the first to venture down,
feeling eyes on my sightless thighs,
scarcely able to breathe
for the weight and male authority of the heat.

Then, at last, I am sliding, shoulders first,
slipping in between fingering swathes
of icy ecstacy.
I feel the heat rushing to the top of my head;
open my legs and feel the cool mouths
of calm, cool green
nuzzling and butting, lifting me aloft.

Sitting back on the swell- so bouyant-
I couldn't sink if I tried.
Feel my boiled, toiled and troubled blood
cooling, cooling, oh bliss! oh hiss!
Every cell in my body sings a sweet anthem.

Every cell in my body hums a humdrum chant
made up on the spot,
with your blue-green, your aquamarine, your celandine
name in it.
Every wide-awake pulsing cell
knows the words to the wet-wet song.
I lift on the swell, then crouch
in the shallows and look up,
so that every new wave towers over me,
and almost fills the hard blue sky-

but the sky now hard-faced
the way women who chain-smoke
have hard and bitter faces,
and the waves fat and soft and embracing-
like the fat, soft women,
the tender-hearted women
who seem to fall in love fatly, softly,
with songs, like too much salt,
encrusted on their heat-puffed lips.

Falling in love like being
lifted on the cool and selfish swell.
And then, there are the troughs
when you are in so much less water
than you had imagined,
and the waves drag at you as you struggle
to stand...
and as you leave the water,
your body is so heavy, so heavy-
you had forgotten the sad and troublesome weight
of carrying your own body.

You sit back on the sand
and remember the weight of being
back on the shore
without the sweet, sweet waves
of infatuation
lifting and dropping,
lifting and dropping you,
again and again.