There was a beach and an apartment house on the beach, the house called Angel, or Sleep. I had come to it invited, if not by a friend, then an intimate acquaintance. I was offered no towel or blanket to put under me, no ready chair. I settled into the yellow sand and the sand gave way. I displaced it with the expanse of my body. This was not pristine white beach, the beach of my childhood. Only workaday sand shored up for playgrounds and worksites where now men in long pants were playing tennis or painting green a wall that shut us off from the sea, a view you didn’t take for granted, you couldn’t exactly believe was there.
Then someone was running toward me in the sand, the slightly muddy sand, his feet exacting speed from it. Past the sunstruck crowds. He was just hitting his stride as a lover, the thunder of that eagerness.
is the author of seven books of poetry and a memoir, The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir. She is a winner of the Walt Whitman Award, the Off the Grid Press Award, a Pew Fellowship, an NEA, and two PA Council on the Arts grants. Her work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, APR, The New Yorker, and other magazines and anthologies.
