D's 40th birthday. We went out to dinner - sushi, of course. I just spent the last hour working on a poem. D. is playing Parasite Eve and having a birthday hot chocolate.
I believe 9pm - 10pm will have to be my set writing time, although again (working on the poem) I fell asleep with my fingers on the keyboard. Repeatedly.
Time for some zzzzz's. But here's the poem - rewritten for the 5th time, originally composed around June 1998, and maybe still not quite there!
McClure's Beach
We walked the length of it
until rocks checked our progress, and wind
had crusted our hair with salty grit.
Then we turned and trudged back,
once more past kelp that had been coughed up
in cold tangles by the waves.
Our daughter was tired but too tired to know it.
She kicked when I carried her, went limp
in the sand when I put her down to walk.
I thought the steep hill to the gravel lot
was all we had left to conquer.
But at a stream flowing thinly into the sea,
my husband stopped, announced:
"I've got to do it."
No sticks at hand, he used his boots
to crumble and crush the shallow banks
and smudge lines it had taken gravity and tide
uncounted hours to make. He found rocks,
lay them in the water to displace the hapless stream.
Our child whined and tugged at me;
both of us dismayed
by his need to redefine the land's borders
to change courses to the sea.
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