The piano I can play
The singing comes harder
I notice that on the beach
When I walk it after my long swim
Having taken the current down
No fighting with it to get back
Usually a humming gets started out of the chest
Out of nowhere along the shoreline edge
Where the wave arrives up to the patted point more walk-able
Where the magician puts its wet gasp bubbling into the sand
Near where a kid pummels someone’s castle
With his shovel, pleasures of all’s fair game destruction
There a song can start to form in fake-it make-it way
Usually from my hum, it would come
But the waves are pounding sounding today
And it was a rocking choppy ride I swum
Even seaweed is making an intermittent fresh green line
And, in the ocean’s stormy din, it cries: “This just in.”
Barbara and her friend left this morning
Her blue suitcase gone and messy table cleared of two notebooks
She stripped the beds and put both sets in the washer
I told her not to bother last night, but she didn’t know
That her suitcase, and the dirty sheets, meant Mom was still just so