Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over <br />again, like the rented animals in Aïda. <br />In the late morning the land breeze <br />turns and now the extras are driving <br />all the white elephants the other way. <br />What language are the children shouting in? <br />He is lying on the beach listening. <br /> <br />The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels. <br />He tries to remember snow noise. <br />Would powder snow ping like that? <br />But you don't lie with your ear to powder snow. <br />Why doesn't the girl who takes care <br />of the children, a Yale girl without flaw, <br />know the difference between lay and lie? <br /> <br />He tries to remember snow, his season. <br />The mind is in charge of things then. <br />Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic, <br />all that openness and swaying. <br />No matter how often you make love <br />in August you're always aware of genitalia, <br />your own and the half-naked others'. <br />Even with the gracefulest bathers <br />you're aware of their kinship with porpoises, <br />mammals disporting themselves in a blue element, <br />smelling slightly of fish.Porpoise Hazard <br />watches himself awhile, like a blue movie. <br /> <br />In the other hemisphere now people <br />are standing up, at work at their easels. <br />There they think about love at night <br />when they take off their serious clothes <br />and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets. <br /> <br />Today the children, his own among them, <br />are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese, <br />using the colonial dialect of Brazil. <br />It is just as well, they have all been changed <br />into small shrill marginal animals, <br />he would not want to understand them again <br />until after Labor Day.He just lays there.<br /><br />William Morris Meredith Jr.<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/rhode-island/
