Beach House Poet
By Jared T. Fischer
An ocean, sea and some land away from the war in Iraq, Wilma Clark at fifty-six sat uncertainly eating custard on the topmost balcony of her Ocean City beach house. She owned a modest, white and blue two-story with three bedrooms, two baths and a double balcony facing the Atlantic.
Sucking on the sour custard but hesitant to remove the cool spoon from her tongue, she sat in a daze, bouncing her knee how one might if holding a child. She stared beyond the beach to the water in an abstractedness of thinking through each arriving wave.
Could Wilma have believed her son Ed to be fine and not wrapped up in a commotion of trucks and tanks roving hazy sand, blind to some trap, she might better have stomached the dessert that once was her medicine and the prospect that had always calmed her.
Despite her restorative efforts with this vacation, any pleasant thinking was fragmentary, and no great series of waves could wash away an imagined shock of gunfire.
An ocean, sea and some land away from the war in Iraq, Wilma Clark at fifty-six sat uncertainly eating custard on the topmost balcony of her Ocean City beach house. She owned a modest, white and blue two-story with three bedrooms, two baths and a double balcony facing the Atlantic.
Sucking on the sour custard but hesitant to remove the cool spoon from her tongue, she sat in a daze, bouncing her knee how one might if holding a child. She stared beyond the beach to the water in an abstractedness of thinking through each arriving wave.
Could Wilma have believed her son Ed to be fine and not wrapped up in a commotion of trucks and tanks roving hazy sand, blind to some trap, she might better have stomached the dessert that once was her medicine and the prospect that had always calmed her.
Despite her restorative efforts with this vacation, any pleasant thinking was fragmentary, and no great series of waves could wash away an imagined shock of gunfire.
I am tumultuous despite myself.
Having trouble getting down the custard, Wilma swallowed and then held up and examined the slimy silver spoon like it was her crummy mirror or a microphone.
My throat is too dry for it to slide down.
If anyone were to see me like this, they would know I’m sick because my son’s in harm’s way.
I have never been spirited up for his absence. Our connection was always so full of love and expression. It was right away that I began reading to him from above his crib. I read books that I believed would be of benefit to him. The Bible was not the only one. I gave him Enoch, Sappho, Omar Khayyam and English poetry. Shelley, Jesus! Of course, little Ed didn’t get any of it. I am not stupid.
But I recall how he would listen to ME and look at me with eyes deeper than oceans or Lake Superior, his mouth wide in a baby’s singular manner of taking in the whole world.
I did not expect then that one day he would make the decision to go away, to serve and defend--a sacrifice against which my heart has always revolted.
God might turn around and let you keep your baby, but the United States and its targets . . . . Well, none of that shit shows mercy!
It sickens my body. I feel ridiculous to be here alone. Memories arrive like waves and then take it all back. The ebb tide does not apologize.
In the abstract, Wilma imagined her son’s experience in Iraq at the same time that she traced the upward, steady flight of a seagull toward the sun. Small things Ed had told her on the phone, in letters and emails mixed with the jarring reports and snake whips of the news she tried not to read or watch, though it was damned everywhere. This balled up paper of mixed information unpacked in her mind and made it so that she could not avoid reading bits of a story--one in part her nerves were writing. It looked to Wilma like the gull had a crab or small fish dangling from its beak.
Damned predators!
She slipped into seeing Ed, or into being him . . . .
From a watchtower Ed vigilantly secures the passage of convoys.
Still embarrassing how natural a gun feels in his possession and how ready he is with a trained response and instincts too. Didn’t have anything leading him to this as a kid. His parents were artists!
But then in high school it all made sense, or Ed tried to have it make sense from one minute to the next. But his thinking screwed him. Other people were also spouting off so much shit.
Ed realized that people were fucking you over everywhere, and it would be better to stand up against ones you could clearly see were trying to ruin life for people.
“Vance, you are a fucking unbelievable scumbag to this very day!”
Wilma spit off the balcony, waking from her own self-submerging thoughts. The gull did not drop the prey but sped its wings in a shot at the sun.
Wilma squirmed to nestle better in her seat. She relaxed her grip on the spoon, scooped it into the custard, and slid back into her thinking. The soothing spoon landed on her tongue and rocked like a little boat with a cargo of only a little custard--because that was making her nauseous; the spoon wasn’t.
Recruiters in the lunchroom promoted the military to Ed as an adventure with a shit ton of benefits. Plus the “call of duty” made you feel you could do something for your family.
Hell, Ed might gain the experiences that could help him write a book.
Besides, his grades weren’t good, not enough to get into anything other than some shit colleges. Junior and senior years in high school are when you fall out with people, and Ed had fallen out with damn near everyone. Such fucking phonies.
He joined. Was surprised how much he liked training. Got to go to Texas and Michigan and all over Maryland. Made endless friends, felt like he was starting a career.
Ed kept thinking I’m okay at this. Might have done equally well at college, been a good student or a shitty one. But at least I’m more mobile doing this, and getting PAID, not flushing money down the toilet. And there is a purpose. Family is the ideal government. Protecting that!--call it freedom or whatever the fuck you want. A family. And not so many phonies doubting the meaning of everything.
Then September 11th cemented his feeling that he was on track to do something, contribute to some change, and protect what shouldn’t change. He didn’t get all prejudiced or righteous, but he thought the outcomes of invading Iraq would benefit Iraqi families and the world.
Wilma’s brow ticked. She was sweating and squinting on account of an intense brightness. Without her knowing it, her eyes had followed the bird into the ball of sun. She turned her head aside, the spoon still in her mouth. Spit swished off it into her cheek. Her eyes widened, seeing . . . .
Ed’s sick or bored from watching. The extreme heat exhausts him. He can’t wait to talk to people at dinner or before bed. He has an itch to draw or look at funny comics.
There’s a woman in her early twenties who keeps within the doorway of one of the houses on the street. She’s pretty but he’s not here for that kind of observation. The whole fucking thing is awkward. What must she think? Trust an American enough to say more than the most basic shit in any language? Right. Not any time soon.
Fine enough seeing her in the doorway from time to time.
Besides, anyone or anything could be part of a ruse, or an incidental trigger of explosion--a van full of school kids, a dog pulling at something behind a trashcan. Ed experienced two blasts already, returned fire. And now look at him trying not to be totally antsy all over again.
“HUUUUUGPH!”
Wilma threw up and came alive, the wet spoon clanking out of her mouth onto the white wire table on the balcony.
Her mind raced her heart.
She breathed heavily as if she had almost drowned or had run uphill being shot at by an unknown assailant.
Wretched custard is not the food for me!
Her mind was a “ship of death” vanishing as it crested wave, wave, wave. Her eyes were empty seashells, washed up and bleached by sun--their former selves could see and hope the bird to remain a safe distance from the sun’s blaze.
Black as a hole is the vanished mind
over matters of the heart.
Wilma, give up! Your poetry, uhh!
Hallucinating possibly? Yes, hallucinating, hallucinating! Now you messed your fucking shirt. Can’t have a simple snack and keep calm.
Fuck if I’m not losing it or going partially blind. That bird is flying back at me with its beak still full, but is growing, shapeshifting . . . .
Wilma smashed her face with her palms and furiously rubbed her eyes. They were sweaty like oysters on the half shell.
Eyes! Eyes!
She freaked because the incoming shapeshifter was not a bird but . . . SHAKESPEARE coming down out of the sky like Jesus, and he held the hand of an attendant actor who dressed as Othello.
“Don’t speak! Don’t say a word to let me know--”
Othello cut Wilma short:
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know't.
No more of that.
“O fuck off. I’m not in the mood for Shakespeare dissecting my mind and heart with his plays. Not in this sun will I lose my damned mind. I was only daydreaming. Now I’m okay.”
Othello was patient.
I pray you, in your letters
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
“Extenuate my ass! I came out here to relax and deal with things on my own terms. Times like this, I wish I never read a bloody thing.”
“Ahem.”
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well . . . .
“Aaaah! I am the one! I am the one loving not wisely! I keep fucking torturing myself.”
Did her own performance unsettle Shakespeare? or was he sick and it was right up his alley? Wilma wanted to spit in his face but didn’t. Shakespeare took Othello’s hand again and together playwright and actor ascended to an invisible high mountain in the blinding sun.
In the slow course of his going, the playwright asked in a polite tone, “Is custard enough for you, dear?”
“I guess not. You would know, motherfucker!”
Dejectedly Wilma spun the slobbery spoon and looked down through the wire table, trying to think.
In blindness, to avoid the sun
is more holocaust than holy.
Human power is a mildewed smile
on a dead poet at the back of the sun.
Still embarrassing how natural a gun feels in his possession and how ready he is with a trained response and instincts too. Didn’t have anything leading him to this as a kid. His parents were artists!
But then in high school it all made sense, or Ed tried to have it make sense from one minute to the next. But his thinking screwed him. Other people were also spouting off so much shit.
Ed realized that people were fucking you over everywhere, and it would be better to stand up against ones you could clearly see were trying to ruin life for people.
“Vance, you are a fucking unbelievable scumbag to this very day!”
Wilma spit off the balcony, waking from her own self-submerging thoughts. The gull did not drop the prey but sped its wings in a shot at the sun.
Wilma squirmed to nestle better in her seat. She relaxed her grip on the spoon, scooped it into the custard, and slid back into her thinking. The soothing spoon landed on her tongue and rocked like a little boat with a cargo of only a little custard--because that was making her nauseous; the spoon wasn’t.
Recruiters in the lunchroom promoted the military to Ed as an adventure with a shit ton of benefits. Plus the “call of duty” made you feel you could do something for your family.
Hell, Ed might gain the experiences that could help him write a book.
Besides, his grades weren’t good, not enough to get into anything other than some shit colleges. Junior and senior years in high school are when you fall out with people, and Ed had fallen out with damn near everyone. Such fucking phonies.
He joined. Was surprised how much he liked training. Got to go to Texas and Michigan and all over Maryland. Made endless friends, felt like he was starting a career.
Ed kept thinking I’m okay at this. Might have done equally well at college, been a good student or a shitty one. But at least I’m more mobile doing this, and getting PAID, not flushing money down the toilet. And there is a purpose. Family is the ideal government. Protecting that!--call it freedom or whatever the fuck you want. A family. And not so many phonies doubting the meaning of everything.
Then September 11th cemented his feeling that he was on track to do something, contribute to some change, and protect what shouldn’t change. He didn’t get all prejudiced or righteous, but he thought the outcomes of invading Iraq would benefit Iraqi families and the world.
Wilma’s brow ticked. She was sweating and squinting on account of an intense brightness. Without her knowing it, her eyes had followed the bird into the ball of sun. She turned her head aside, the spoon still in her mouth. Spit swished off it into her cheek. Her eyes widened, seeing . . . .
Ed’s sick or bored from watching. The extreme heat exhausts him. He can’t wait to talk to people at dinner or before bed. He has an itch to draw or look at funny comics.
There’s a woman in her early twenties who keeps within the doorway of one of the houses on the street. She’s pretty but he’s not here for that kind of observation. The whole fucking thing is awkward. What must she think? Trust an American enough to say more than the most basic shit in any language? Right. Not any time soon.
Fine enough seeing her in the doorway from time to time.
Besides, anyone or anything could be part of a ruse, or an incidental trigger of explosion--a van full of school kids, a dog pulling at something behind a trashcan. Ed experienced two blasts already, returned fire. And now look at him trying not to be totally antsy all over again.
“HUUUUUGPH!”
Wilma threw up and came alive, the wet spoon clanking out of her mouth onto the white wire table on the balcony.
Her mind raced her heart.
She breathed heavily as if she had almost drowned or had run uphill being shot at by an unknown assailant.
Wretched custard is not the food for me!
Her mind was a “ship of death” vanishing as it crested wave, wave, wave. Her eyes were empty seashells, washed up and bleached by sun--their former selves could see and hope the bird to remain a safe distance from the sun’s blaze.
Black as a hole is the vanished mind
over matters of the heart.
Wilma, give up! Your poetry, uhh!
Hallucinating possibly? Yes, hallucinating, hallucinating! Now you messed your fucking shirt. Can’t have a simple snack and keep calm.
Fuck if I’m not losing it or going partially blind. That bird is flying back at me with its beak still full, but is growing, shapeshifting . . . .
Wilma smashed her face with her palms and furiously rubbed her eyes. They were sweaty like oysters on the half shell.
Eyes! Eyes!
She freaked because the incoming shapeshifter was not a bird but . . . SHAKESPEARE coming down out of the sky like Jesus, and he held the hand of an attendant actor who dressed as Othello.
“Don’t speak! Don’t say a word to let me know--”
Othello cut Wilma short:
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know't.
No more of that.
“O fuck off. I’m not in the mood for Shakespeare dissecting my mind and heart with his plays. Not in this sun will I lose my damned mind. I was only daydreaming. Now I’m okay.”
Othello was patient.
I pray you, in your letters
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
“Extenuate my ass! I came out here to relax and deal with things on my own terms. Times like this, I wish I never read a bloody thing.”
“Ahem.”
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well . . . .
“Aaaah! I am the one! I am the one loving not wisely! I keep fucking torturing myself.”
Did her own performance unsettle Shakespeare? or was he sick and it was right up his alley? Wilma wanted to spit in his face but didn’t. Shakespeare took Othello’s hand again and together playwright and actor ascended to an invisible high mountain in the blinding sun.
In the slow course of his going, the playwright asked in a polite tone, “Is custard enough for you, dear?”
“I guess not. You would know, motherfucker!”
Dejectedly Wilma spun the slobbery spoon and looked down through the wire table, trying to think.
In blindness, to avoid the sun
is more holocaust than holy.
Human power is a mildewed smile
on a dead poet at the back of the sun.
Her thinking in poetry was always so damned obscure.
She understood it a moment later when the gull cried--no longer a bard, no longer with something in its beak--and she had every awareness of her own skull, the pressure and sparks in the brain. If crazy or blind, what good was it to avoid the source of one’s debilitation?
To abandon custard and my way of handling my business--why, that would be hard.
What’s wrong with being a mother? I’ve liked it. Is it so fucking laughable to the world that some things that come with it have pained me?
When she believed her husband Vance, she was young, with Ed in her womb enlarging like a sea anemone.
Carry a child only to find out your husband’s enjoying the life of a bass: from woman to woman, flip-flopping in and out of water.
My muscles still register the pains of childbirth and the indignity of being married to an asshole.
Fortunately, at first Ed was unaware.
Then for me to give his father away at the edge of a frying pan!
If it’s a cliché, it worked. I was bashing his ass out the door.
Vance was five years older than Wilma. A pompous painter.
The two of them became a couple when Wilma was twenty.
She studied Education and English Literature at Goucher, at that time a women’s college in Baltimore. Evenings she would go downtown with friends to exhibits around Maryland Institute College of Art. Wild showings in Bolton Hill! Then a number of Vance’s huge narrative paintings were stirring sensations at the Black Frog Gallery on Howard Street. Wilma made it to the show.
Fell for his ass.
At his show Vance stood in the doorway, drinking mineral water. Had a black beard and wore a fitted suit.
But inside the gallery, you’d look up and there were all kinds of manageries on the walls.
Skies always on fire. The animals were sexual: 69ing anteaters, submissive sheep and lions playing rough. Very improvised--going backwards on the Adam and Eve myth, or an apocalypse.
He kept repeating himself on different canvases, slamming his notion of sexual frustration being in mortal combat with an animal world against all critics and professors in attendance.
Above all, he delighted in the reactions of young women from the colleges. He lived off their attention.
I was looking at one painting that wasn’t bad, chasing a little story of my own in it, about a bear and her cubs.
Wilma perplexed Vance and so he approached her. She wore a red wool pea coat and damp curls hung alluringly around her cheeks. He thought she had lynx eyes.
“A lot of fur and guts went into these. But I don’t think you like what you see.”
“Oh no, I am definitely intrigued. Reminds me of the apocalyptic stuff I’ve been reading.”
“I’d love for you to read me some horrors of the end sometime.”
“Maybe some Enoch, but I’d rather read Rimbaud. I write, too. But I’m not sure about it.”
“I can say I’d take your words over anything French.”
From that moment the exchange and the constant encouragement to share more and more.
Then we married.
Thought our bond was powerful, on track to be sustained over many years, but enjoying such intensity without reflection or space, as a young wife I sped along unprepared . . . .
Well, jealousy or not--you can’t prepare for someone going behind your back screwing you over.
Even before Ed was born, Vance had started enjoying hidden summer days of swimming at Prettyboy Reservoir with a new arrival to MICA named Raven.
Ed was born. That happiness jelled the couple for a time, but soon Vance took on more mistresses than canvases.
He did not stop. Countless times he disappointed Wilma, and those lynx eyes reddened. Finally, it was a flying frying pan and attendant eggs that propelled him to leave.
Wilma could hear Ed crying in his playpen.
What would she ever say about his father?
When Wilma refused to forgive Vance’s infidelity, he nestled his head in alcohol’s severe bosom.
Vance’s art deteriorated over time, as did his ego. The last things he painted were portraits of caged monkeys.
That was then.
Now Wilma believed she had to keep her eyes elevated for Ed. Make every effort to appear happy and unchanged--retaining the sacred order of the beach house.
Thus upon her arrival in July she stocked the fridge with hams, potato salad, salad niçoise, butter for bread, white wine, and of course custard.
All the years I brought Ed here, first as a little boy when I bought the place, then as a teen, and then just a year ago--it was hardly different.
I remember the first time walking with him on the beach:
“Mom, is that spinach?”
“That’s seaweed . . . entangled with little shells.”
Held his hand so he couldn’t run off and get sucked up by a big wave. That feeling of holding on to someone for dear life.
Now after the custard she fixed a ham sandwich with tarragon mayonnaise, enjoyed it, licked her fingers and dropped the knife on the wire table.
She left the beach house for a walk.
She coursed through the thick sand of the small dunes, walked past the sunbathers and volleyball players and made it to the flat-packed sand perpetually moistened by the waves.
Got to find at least a few hermit crabs. Saw a hermit crab the first time when I was five.
Mother in her one-piece bathing suit said, “Lower here, Hon. See, scuttling across the wet sand--a hermit crab. Its body is perfectly curled to the shell. But really that shell is quite a weight to lug around.”
Glad I don’t have a shell.
She wasn’t finding any crabs. She got bored of looking for them.
The ocean was more stunning than she ever remembered it. Out in the light surf there was a father hoisting his daughter into the air. Her laugh rang out like a gull’s scream.
The feeling of holding Ed rushed into Wilma’s arms. All the sun’s light sort of whited out the memory but the feeling held on.
Getting in, she thought the saltwater was pretty much tepid. Her feet tucked into the sand as the water pulled. She was close to the father.
He was hunkered down like a walrus. He took command of a pail, setting down the groundwork for a sandcastle the girl would enjoy.
Then the girl’s little palms were all over it, creating the battlements.
Wilma came out of the waves to the soggy sand the waves washed. She lowered down and jabbed an arm into a pool of water to find sand crabs. She wore a light orange blouse and floral skirt over her bathing suit. Didn’t mind the feeling of the skirt getting wet.
No sand crabs. The grease on her fingers from the sandwich came off in the puddle.
Then she moved, squatted again and pulled a canal through the higher sand. She waited and soon the water rushed to that level, flooding the tiny gully.
Eddies, like frantic mothers, rushed to pull back the sea’s flesh and blood from Wilma’s digging. All that she could find were seashells, crushed--fragmented.
Since the beginning of Ed’s active duty in Iraq--all those improvised explosives being televised daily like shrapnel to blast out a mother’s eyes--Wilma’s thinking in poetry increased.
It obsessed her but was the only thing besides eating that did anything for her nerves.
Now with the waves crashing over her shins and soaking her butt, she was at it again.
She understood it a moment later when the gull cried--no longer a bard, no longer with something in its beak--and she had every awareness of her own skull, the pressure and sparks in the brain. If crazy or blind, what good was it to avoid the source of one’s debilitation?
To abandon custard and my way of handling my business--why, that would be hard.
What’s wrong with being a mother? I’ve liked it. Is it so fucking laughable to the world that some things that come with it have pained me?
When she believed her husband Vance, she was young, with Ed in her womb enlarging like a sea anemone.
Carry a child only to find out your husband’s enjoying the life of a bass: from woman to woman, flip-flopping in and out of water.
My muscles still register the pains of childbirth and the indignity of being married to an asshole.
Fortunately, at first Ed was unaware.
Then for me to give his father away at the edge of a frying pan!
If it’s a cliché, it worked. I was bashing his ass out the door.
Vance was five years older than Wilma. A pompous painter.
The two of them became a couple when Wilma was twenty.
She studied Education and English Literature at Goucher, at that time a women’s college in Baltimore. Evenings she would go downtown with friends to exhibits around Maryland Institute College of Art. Wild showings in Bolton Hill! Then a number of Vance’s huge narrative paintings were stirring sensations at the Black Frog Gallery on Howard Street. Wilma made it to the show.
Fell for his ass.
At his show Vance stood in the doorway, drinking mineral water. Had a black beard and wore a fitted suit.
But inside the gallery, you’d look up and there were all kinds of manageries on the walls.
Skies always on fire. The animals were sexual: 69ing anteaters, submissive sheep and lions playing rough. Very improvised--going backwards on the Adam and Eve myth, or an apocalypse.
He kept repeating himself on different canvases, slamming his notion of sexual frustration being in mortal combat with an animal world against all critics and professors in attendance.
Above all, he delighted in the reactions of young women from the colleges. He lived off their attention.
I was looking at one painting that wasn’t bad, chasing a little story of my own in it, about a bear and her cubs.
Wilma perplexed Vance and so he approached her. She wore a red wool pea coat and damp curls hung alluringly around her cheeks. He thought she had lynx eyes.
“A lot of fur and guts went into these. But I don’t think you like what you see.”
“Oh no, I am definitely intrigued. Reminds me of the apocalyptic stuff I’ve been reading.”
“I’d love for you to read me some horrors of the end sometime.”
“Maybe some Enoch, but I’d rather read Rimbaud. I write, too. But I’m not sure about it.”
“I can say I’d take your words over anything French.”
From that moment the exchange and the constant encouragement to share more and more.
Then we married.
Thought our bond was powerful, on track to be sustained over many years, but enjoying such intensity without reflection or space, as a young wife I sped along unprepared . . . .
Well, jealousy or not--you can’t prepare for someone going behind your back screwing you over.
Even before Ed was born, Vance had started enjoying hidden summer days of swimming at Prettyboy Reservoir with a new arrival to MICA named Raven.
Ed was born. That happiness jelled the couple for a time, but soon Vance took on more mistresses than canvases.
He did not stop. Countless times he disappointed Wilma, and those lynx eyes reddened. Finally, it was a flying frying pan and attendant eggs that propelled him to leave.
Wilma could hear Ed crying in his playpen.
What would she ever say about his father?
When Wilma refused to forgive Vance’s infidelity, he nestled his head in alcohol’s severe bosom.
Vance’s art deteriorated over time, as did his ego. The last things he painted were portraits of caged monkeys.
That was then.
Now Wilma believed she had to keep her eyes elevated for Ed. Make every effort to appear happy and unchanged--retaining the sacred order of the beach house.
Thus upon her arrival in July she stocked the fridge with hams, potato salad, salad niçoise, butter for bread, white wine, and of course custard.
All the years I brought Ed here, first as a little boy when I bought the place, then as a teen, and then just a year ago--it was hardly different.
I remember the first time walking with him on the beach:
“Mom, is that spinach?”
“That’s seaweed . . . entangled with little shells.”
Held his hand so he couldn’t run off and get sucked up by a big wave. That feeling of holding on to someone for dear life.
Now after the custard she fixed a ham sandwich with tarragon mayonnaise, enjoyed it, licked her fingers and dropped the knife on the wire table.
She left the beach house for a walk.
She coursed through the thick sand of the small dunes, walked past the sunbathers and volleyball players and made it to the flat-packed sand perpetually moistened by the waves.
Got to find at least a few hermit crabs. Saw a hermit crab the first time when I was five.
Mother in her one-piece bathing suit said, “Lower here, Hon. See, scuttling across the wet sand--a hermit crab. Its body is perfectly curled to the shell. But really that shell is quite a weight to lug around.”
Glad I don’t have a shell.
She wasn’t finding any crabs. She got bored of looking for them.
The ocean was more stunning than she ever remembered it. Out in the light surf there was a father hoisting his daughter into the air. Her laugh rang out like a gull’s scream.
The feeling of holding Ed rushed into Wilma’s arms. All the sun’s light sort of whited out the memory but the feeling held on.
Getting in, she thought the saltwater was pretty much tepid. Her feet tucked into the sand as the water pulled. She was close to the father.
He was hunkered down like a walrus. He took command of a pail, setting down the groundwork for a sandcastle the girl would enjoy.
Then the girl’s little palms were all over it, creating the battlements.
Wilma came out of the waves to the soggy sand the waves washed. She lowered down and jabbed an arm into a pool of water to find sand crabs. She wore a light orange blouse and floral skirt over her bathing suit. Didn’t mind the feeling of the skirt getting wet.
No sand crabs. The grease on her fingers from the sandwich came off in the puddle.
Then she moved, squatted again and pulled a canal through the higher sand. She waited and soon the water rushed to that level, flooding the tiny gully.
Eddies, like frantic mothers, rushed to pull back the sea’s flesh and blood from Wilma’s digging. All that she could find were seashells, crushed--fragmented.
Since the beginning of Ed’s active duty in Iraq--all those improvised explosives being televised daily like shrapnel to blast out a mother’s eyes--Wilma’s thinking in poetry increased.
It obsessed her but was the only thing besides eating that did anything for her nerves.
Now with the waves crashing over her shins and soaking her butt, she was at it again.
My body and the ocean
My mind quick as a gull
That flies but less steady
Will there ever be a time
Ignorant of human misery
When the waves hit shore
I can’t escape on wings
I’m stuck where I am
And can’t tread water
Sucked into a sea
too fat with tears
When a wave pulls back
It sinks my chest
To the bottom of the ocean
Or when a tidal wave comes
It rolls me under
And I break upon myself
This pen snaps and sprays
Black octopus ink upon the page
My breasts are cliffs and dunes
Depressed like sand
Warred on by wind and water
When Shakespeare comes crowned in sun
Walking on water like Jesus
My poem loses sight
Becomes drenched paper
The ink washes away
O what are these words
I write to my son
Completing this “failed” poem, Wilma felt a severe breakup in the therapy of her own words. How long had it been since she had heard from Ed?
She had not resorted to instant messaging over the computer because she knew Ed never really liked to go online with his screen name PantoumGuy. And seeing him offline always seemed to give her chest pain.
Where is he? What is he doing?
And the last email was from June. Vague assurances of his well-being and that of his fellow soldiers. He wrote last that he was doing convoy security up in a watchtower and also stationed at checkpoints.
When he made his daily operations sound cut-and-dried like that, Wilma couldn’t help but to imagine more. Ed also always threw in a little literature. Wilma found it sappy.
read from the sound and the fury today--just the sections by benjy and quentin. when i read about their poor immobile mother, overwhelmed with concern and despair, i thanked heaven i am so fortunate to have you who are so full of life, love and encouragement. a sense of life is really what’s needed here or anywhere.
She didn’t have a way to control it when she went back inside the beach house with sand on her hands. Her outfit was soaked around her thighs and buttocks. No hermit crabs or sand crabs emerged to calm her.
But why come back to the fridge?
She caught sight of the ravenous twitch in her hands as she opened another custard.
Shit already made you sick.
Just fucking call and get somebody to get Ed on the phone. I could listen to him talk about anything.
Too much custard. She needed salt. She took some of the ham out of the fridge, set it on the kitchen island and looked for the mayonnaise. She lathered the meat in a glaze.
Wilma decided she was going to keep her head up and be patient.
Don’t crawl up his ass and stress him out with all kinds of anxiety.
She came to the sliding door before the balcony and squinted her eyes against the red dropping sun. The ocean had calmed into small whispering brushstrokes of foam and blue.
Then she couldn’t believe it. Upside down, dependent from the sun Shakespeare smoked a pipe, reclining in a beach chair. Finally, he said, “Write after dinner. Write as the sun disappears into the sea.”
In some ways she felt the evening was getting off to a good start. She wrote a poem.
Where Are You in All of This
You don’t bring me calm
I hear just the wash of water
I only see the sun
And the crazed bird near its flame
I wish my heart remained the same
Unlike changes in the sand
When waves carve out dunes
And blast the dream castles
Erected by little hands and big palms
A child and her father
Your father left forever
And I learned a stronger love
But now you left for my sake
This sea separates our worlds
Your sand mixed with gunpowder
Mine with shattered shells
I wish your voice would swallow
The ocean’s roar and slithering foam
O where are you in all of this
Wilma grew exhausted and miserable. The poems, salads, custard, and ham had done little to attenuate the sickness that claimed her body as a strong wave can claim a dead and drying horseshoe crab.
The sun was already wading in the water and the sky had purpled for the night. Wilma reviewed her latest poem on the wire table under the lantern of the balcony.
She drank some orange juice with the white wine in it. But then her stomach gurgled and rumbled. She couldn’t hold the meat well. A shot of vodka didn’t help either.
Fuck the television--she knew awful shit would be on the news.
She was restless.
She wrapped up the feast and cleared the wire table of her poems.
A night walk along the beach right by the ocean might be the only thing.
The air mixed hot and cold in that exhilarating way afforded by summer nights. The waves were unruly. The moon was up to something, giving the wailing, watery sirens a reason to . . . .
That fucking war!
So distant from this place of waiting and trying not to cry, not to tear everything apart and cast it into the sea. She felt an urge to fall down and so she did.
She laughed. She was like a child but she knew she was a mother.
Vance never could have painted an apocalypse like this night. She thought the waves were getting too loud, like people at a funeral. Shit, Shakespeare had shut up as soon as the sun was out of the picture.
She laughed again.
Then she felt her arms doing something. And her legs. She was making sand angels real close to the water.
Sand Angel, Sand Angel, protect my son when I cannot.
But each time she formed one wing or part of the dress in the sand, the wailing, ravenously mourning waves came to shred the angel, suggesting in screams of spray that it could not be: nothing can be safe.
She kept forming the angel though, despite all the cold water that had entered her mouth and nose and made her nipples erect in her bathing suit. She didn’t cry. She laughed and formed the angel until she grew too tired to move.
Early August reached its pinnacle of heat when a call came to Wilma’s beach house from the Fisher House in Landstuhl, Germany. While securing a convoy of supplies en route between checkpoints, Ed had been struck in the head by shrapnel from a roadside bomb. It blasted out his right eye and deformed his skull but miraculously missed his brain.
In fact, Ed was stable enough now to talk to his mother, though she felt like she was about to puke.
German surgeons had completed almost all of the reconstructive surgery, including reinforced cheekbones and an artificial eye that was as wonderfully blue as his real one.
It was important only for him to rest and recover.
“It felt like I was hit in the face with a Louisville Slugger.”
“Ed, god, I feel terribly sick. I need to be there with you. I will take the next plane.”
“Mom, don’t worry, don’t go to the trouble. I am coming home as soon as I get well enough to leave here. I am all done.”
“I thank all the world that you are alive and that I am hearing your voice. The beach house is ready for you to come and enjoy the ocean.”
“Have you been writing anything good?”
“Some poems. Just a worried mother’s desperate words. Nonsense.”
“I’m sure they're remarkable literary works, Mom. I finally started keeping a journal like you always told me I should. It’s just kind of sad that it took a war for me to start putting my life and ideas on paper.”
“No. Experience brings a purity of thought and emotion out of us. And that can never be sad.”
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