Albert's Landing

I've taken to swimming Little Albert's Landing,

From jetty to jetty in the late afternoon sun.

I can do it one way,

In one hundred modified backstrokes,

More or less,

Always keeping the sunlight in my face

And the empty hill that cradled the Bell estate on my left,

Gardiner's Island out across the bay on my right.

Literally no one on the beach or in the water for that matter

Except me, thousands of sand eels and wild-eyed baby blues,

A family of piping plovers pecking at the tide line and an osprey circling

And waiting, waiting, waiting.

I listen to my breathing, then, as I swim,

I listen to my heart beat, the sound of the water as it swirls about me,

The bright light dancing on the water,

Free-floating in this eclectic sea of hope, even as I struggle to accept these forces

That bind me to this earth,

To this pulsing sea, to this surging life around me,

To my own cell of pain.

Later, lying on a flat rock, giving my back it's heat and hardness, yes,

A man can be blind in so many ways,

Leaving his life to a future that will never come,

Circling and waiting, waiting, waiting

While all of the world pounds and swells beneath him,

Calling his name softly in its profound eternity.

Mud

The intertidal smell of mussels opening and closing as the skin pulls back. 
The black mud speckled with piss clam tunnels. 
Boys with flat sticks wiggling bare toes, a jab and thrust, clams in the air.
 Jabbing and thrusting is what boys do, piss clams flying through the air. 
Fiddler crabs peering out sideways from their hideouts. 
The boys scurry sideways to mimic the crabs, throwing long ribbons of seaweed at one another, in their hair, slapping their faces, flying though the air.

There were girls here the night before, girls and music. 

The boys swirled through their faint, sweet fog. 
The scent opened something hidden. 
The deep inside them mixed with the fog and doors opened everywhere. 
There are not always enough locks or keys to go around. 
Some of the doors are closed forever. Some doors are hanging off their hinges. 
Someone said once that everything has been thought of.

The boys think of these girls over and over again, they think of almost nothing else, they dart here and there after fiddler crabs as the bright light beats down on their bare skin and they think of girls. 

To stand on the water, to stand in a boat in the water, the salt drying in white streaks on their skin, their skin that longs for the girls hidden in the sweet, dank mud of desire before they even know it. 

Before they even know it they are thinking of girls again and again, even as they are covered in mud and seaweed and laughing sideways at each other they are still jabbing and thrusting though the sweet, sweet fog again and again and even, again.