The Blue Moon Review

A word dressed in fog
by Dennis Finnell

That was last century.  This century we drive cars
Named for big dirty cities, or named for good
Old-fashioned American ideals.  We drive to the Cape
Where we gaze, with breaks from dazzling blue-gray
Monotony to once in a while steal
Quick looks at people--
                         like the threesome
Playing cards under the protective hand
Of a big green beach umbrella.

They're from Quebec, arrived two nights ago
In a Honda Civic, two younger men, one woman, older,
With a body out of Breughel, and mother-
Ly, especially in her quick glances
At the younger man who has been made thin,
The one wearing the straw boater, like the hats
In Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party.

Yesterday after dinner this thin man stood
At the top of the wooden stairway.  It's a steep angle
Of ninety-six wooden steps
Down the dune's face.  He used both hands,
Leaning on the back of a white Adirondack chair.  He looked up

Too long at the dunes, at the wildflowers called 
Rosa blanda that clung
Like crabs all over the sand, maybe seeing in them
His own face of roseate
Sores.  
        And what did the roses make of
His face--did they intuit the familiar, 
A hybrid rose on two feet?

And then he turned his white face 
On the sea, that kept going about
Its business, making waves, but 
Not hoodwinking him.
He could hear it identifying itself as it roared 
Far out, fell, and dispersed, syllable 
By syllable.  And it asked him, 
"Why do you all come

To me?  I'm just saltwater.  I'm neither 
More nor less than my long,
Long utterance which, if you must 
Know, in a nutshell is
`Give me your old, the stupid, the weak.  
Fall down before me.  Kiss this mouth I am.'
So why come to me?  Do I look like some specialist

Who'll write a prescription for your face?
I'm not a consultant on living, not 
A guru after whom a wing
At the hospice has been named.  For the hundredth 
Time I ask you to leave me in peace.

Besides, you're wrong.  Why do you think I'm always working
Myself to a frazzle against these dunes?
For my health?  Did you ever think
Up there on two legs with your dunes and arms and roses

That maybe I keep knocking myself out
To get my own answers.  Tell me,
Where do I come from?  
Aren't you mostly water, just chemicals 
With limbs and a head, that can feel?  And what is it to feel?"

The man who's been made thin
Carried his rosetta face
Down the wooden stairway.  Now
I've heard it all.
He counted the steps . . . 
Ninety-five.  Ninety-six.  Finally.

He walked barefoot on
The beach, a stick
Man, his straw hat off, hair mostly
Lost, to chemicals, a hint of the old cowlick
Over the shining at his crown.  And he talked to the sea.

"In my tongue your name sounds like
Our word for `mother.'  They're homonyms.

Those who were first thrilled with speech,
A feeling like being deeply kissed by the mouth 
Of the world as you devour it,
They too walked a sugary beach like this one
Somewhere sometime, eyeing the poor 
Emptied shells and overhead
The culprit gull, his wings held on the air in a crooked M,
The old Phoenician glyph called mem, meaning

Water.  Those who first spoke, eating
Their daily ration of the world 
And spitting it loudly out, must have 
Looked at such creatures, apparently 
Weightless in the steaming air above their sea, 
Marrying the gull's crooked wings 
From then on with water.  
They must have walked near water like yours,

Atlantic, and saw out of who-knows-what
Residue of design a word
Dressed in fog out of a mouth dancing
With the big, filthy world.  And its child
Is us, pointing to something like you, 
And making a sound for mother."

The man who's been made thin
Stopped talking to the Atlantic.  He walked on
Along the beach, between water on his left rising up in waves
For no reason, as humans sometimes do
Because the crowd does, and the steep
Dunes on the right held in a big slow wave.

Two of many clocks for him, the insistent 
One of water saying walk, 
Walk, and the real slow one
Of sand which whispers, or does it bitch?

He felt the beach sand under his bony feet--
It almost tickled between his toes--these historical
Globelets of silica, each with its essay
On this shellfish or that.

                            He is made thin, "light,
More pure," he joked to himself, even though
He felt his own more slight weight
Amplified by the multiplier of disease.
He would not bend over

To pick up the hermit crab's shell, even though
It's beautiful, its interior marbled
Like the veined sheen of an old man's face,
Even though his mother would have gladly taken it from him,
Kept it in lieu of him on her nightstand,
Even though it was one more version of himself,
What he'd done, where he's headed.

"Shell, whose marble face
Will you help hold up?"

To bend over meant he would have felt his torso,
Balding head, accuse him.  It would have multiplied
That all he'd done
Had come home to his body, weighing 
It down, a packed tiny house.
He would not bend over

To pick up the coin somehow beached there,
Even though it might have held
His life's copper version, his face
Coppered.  He had already almost freed
Himself, if he could have made death his life,
Master his equal.  Heads?
Tails?

        He walked back to the protective hand
Of the big green beach umbrella.
His footprints filled with the Atlantic,
Seeping in from below.  The Atlantic watched
The man who has been made thin then climb
Ninety-six wooden steps up 
The dune's face, using both hands on the guard rails,

"A hybrid rose on two feet climbing
The dune's face, a rose soon to float on my face,
Soon to be crushed into perfume."