Poetry by Poem

Into the White Sunlight

I doff my sandals, unwrap the towel from around my waist and spread it over the sand – stretch myself onto its warm, soft ringlets. My body, which is beginning to sag limply around me, heaves with the deep sigh of a woman breaking the surface of the water after a long dive. I have escaped. I know I have. Because I can feel my cell shedding from off of me:
The sky is faintly smeared here and there with translucent, insubstantial clouds as though a child has taken a paint-tipped brush to its gradual, blue surface. White sunlight is blasting off the sand. Everywhere people lay flattened under its warm, blindingly disarming weight. Voices can only lilt through the mesmerizing, rhythmical rush of the water on and off of the beach. The roar of jet engines overhead dissolves into that noise like salt into the lake that makes it and everything seems gently muted – soft and malleable. There is no sense that time is pushing through me with its usual, glacial indifference.
Now is a warm, soft pool of gentle currents. The water will drift softly this way and that – the sand will move palpably under the hand – the air will slide around the body, muss the hair and caress the skin, which melts into the vague, sun-blasted colors of this lithe world and is no longer clear. Everything is sensually one. The curved bodies – tan and creamy and undulating through the watery air – the curved sand – rising and falling under the sun with the same subtle tones like a supple, milky echo. Like an alto’s notes, voiced into a pillow.
Only the broken-timbred exclamations of three drunkards at the water’s foot stands apart, discomfiting and shredded – but even it is somehow gradually swallowed by the smooth, mucous atmosphere of the lake and the sun and the sand.
Inwardly, the rolls of a despising laughter massage my stomach and I swish my hand through the palpable light as if to smear the offenders into the colors of the sky – so impotent and ethereal are their forms. But there are consciousnesses behind those body-shapes and wills will not so easily smudge. One of them has seen my hand – assumed I meant to wave. One of them is un-melting into clarity in front of me – holding a cigarette. I sense a frictious, disseminated sound – perhaps a voice – asking for a light. I shake my head at the two-dimensional, undulate blur here in my vision and feel immediately the shocks of an alcoholic laugh, distant and irrelevant, as the shape re-melts – is gone. I fall backwards, merge with the sand.
But something is different. I open my mouth to inhale just two or three final draughts of the free air, my lips envelope the atmosphere desperately until I force them shut dully and the sand all around me breaks apart before the toes of six feet.
Because there were three of them, the drinkers. And now there are three – surrounding me, filling the horizon it seems – remotely talking to me, guffawing, raucous and distant, shamelessly looking at my chest. I curse myself for wearing a bikini because I know it is my undoing: that they have come for me.
Too late to run of course, but I have a little dignity – no kicking or screaming. I came quietly – so will I go.
I wrap my towel around me and wordlessly get up to leave. A cloud from somewhere has covered the sun – the beach darkens, the cloud itself becomes a sudden black as if it had given up its spirit. I can hear them laughing at me, clearly now – crystalline and cutting. A jet screams over the city, the beach shudders. The breeze whips off the lake, a mess of unhealthy odors on its back. I look at my feet – there had been sand, now only countless, miniscule stones tumbling frantically off of my dorsals – clinging wickedly to the pores in my shins.
Everything is a brittle, disparate grey. All I can see are broken pieces – jagged shards of a billion incongruous slices of the world. Nothing belongs to anything – as though every atom is stuffed alone into some corner of the universe – as if the universe is made of corners in which to stuff them. Ah, this is the city that traps me – alone and trembling and baring its teeth.
And I am baring my teeth.
I stop at the concrete edge of the beach and turn to scowl at the rats who have given me away. I do it because I hate them. I do it because I am cornered – like they are – and I want them to stay just as cornered. I do it because this is the way cities work: we prisoners are each other’s jailers.
My inebriated captors break into a new wave of nauseous, dizzy laughter as I twist truculently and stomp away. At least I know they won’t be rewarded for my capture – who would bother?
My heart is racing again, my movements robotic again – I am ice again. I barrel through the curveless passages of grey stone and acrid tar that make up the streets of my neighborhood. I see nothing.
At the door to my tiny apartment, as I turn the key rustily in its lock, I glance through the claustrophobia of edges of buildings and steel phalluses to a tiny wedge of the lake from which I have come. The sun is shining again there now and the water is brilliantly, blindingly golden – a far off heaven twinkling through the drudgery of the world. Like an image glowing on one of the summer-time movie screens in our shoe-trampled parks. And I can only look.