Combing Florida's Shores
Poems of Two Lifetimes
Paperback: 88
Published: 2006
Price: $15.95
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Combing Florida's Shores is a poetic memoir. Part one depicts a man, his wife, and their girl and boy reveling in the joys of vacationing in Fort Lauderdale. The second section chronicles the now-divorced man returning to his old haunts, with a new love, to find that everything, and nothing, is the same.
This gentle drama of two lifetimes, unfolding over a span of thirty years, concludes with the man combing the shores of his mortality, hoping to make peace with his unraveled past and let contentment fill his future.
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Running the Beach
I stream down the bather-dotted beach,
Racing against my perspiring self, without reason,
Inspired, perhaps, by the sheer lust of running,
Of feeling the blood pounding in the throat.
Watching my feet make indentations
In the water-soggy sand,
I look back to see the fact of passage,
In tracks attached by a thread
Weaving off a human spool.
I rush ahead of the body's capacity
For sustaining psychic desire
To outdo human limitations.
Legs and arms thrust pistonlike;
Eyes, throbbing, pulsating, defy vision;
The machinery composed of bone and muscle
Conspires against the coordinating self,
To throw off my natural timing,
Collapse my fired lungs.
Finally, the beach recedes from infinity,
Arrives at a point where I converge with it.
My heaving chest is a furnace.
The blood pumps backward, from veins to arteries,
Toward a confused heart.
Seconds drag into hours; minutes become days,
Until the body begins its return, into the breeze.
Only, now, my footprints are gone.
There's no proof I ever passed this way.
