Seachange

Blue neon pales the alley and nothing
calms the woeful sea if won’t come she
to the window.

No, too drouged to hear.
Her golden green hair billows across
the Motel Fregata bed, and deep her
foghorn bellows mute in pillowed sleep.

So solo out off the beam down to the coaly beach,
flip flop in shallow cool pools, lured by a small moon coin.

Up the beach a fire spits, a bottle breaks, and a guitar flashes.
Over the wooden trestle, a harmonica passes.
The surf hisses yeses as from the rocks a wiggly piss-take.
Boon a mist sleeks in, so tack-back to the warm room.

Seaweed wrapped around orange plastic curlers,
with foam jelled fingers that collect flotsam and jetsam
and want some. Curls taped to cheeks and brow.

She was a beachcomber scavenging in kaleidoscope
curly cuffed bell bottoms, passing
across blond sand dunes
where she learned to stretch and yaw,
surfing loose blousy waves off breezy reaches,
coasting through town down to the beach
on a one speed lazy bicycle, surf mat under arm,
red-orange towel slapping behind, salted hair curling,
tangling kite wagtails, waves gushing the beach,
curling around sandcastles where sand crabs
and children bubble and fizzle in the foam drizzle,
no wonder of the surfer’s troubled faith in waves.

Wet and salty wind full in our wrinkled faces,
we swim out, hold hands through curling waves,
dive, burbling breathless under waves,
fall and turn and spin with the waves,
hear the waxy epizeuxis of waves.

By the coyest hairs we argue, liking to talk
while we surf, something about a tiger shark and riptides,
an illuminated jellyfish, a juicy green sea anemone,
and a Brobdingnagian turtle as old as the ocean.

We lock fingers in curls and pull to the curling top,
your oily fisheyes turned to my qualmy cockeyes.

A swell rises to a wave of oyesses,
we kick and touch and tussle for air,
and the wave breaks into foam and washes us in,
prone in repose in the rushing foam.