I’ve spread a blanket on the beach so many times; taken a cache of feathers, quartz, and sticks into my lap; tracked ……………….the sign of himself a five-year-old can transfix
by drawing across sand some fragment of shell or branch; I’ve nodded, murmured, smiled, okayed, and gasped so often for castle and trench, ……………….that whatever the something-else I was asked
or thought I’d do, these scripts have eroded it. There’s always a youngest, always another one whose concentrated task ……………….rests on my languorous act. I lie with my back to the sun.
The summers go on and on. Somewhere people talk with aim, embank, assess, envision maps, or, Agonistes-like, ……………….stand chained to cenotaphs, and cause collapse:
they’re listening to the loud face of the world. I hear their echoes, organizing stuff, their aims, their race-course calx, ……………….their laurel glory. And I hear the stratum slough
to gentle sand. Once again I take into my hands an infant, newly born, to offer her my breast. Our mingled sweat ……………….imprints the shoreline’s schisted blur.