Troughs and Peaks

The ocean cycles like a butterfly. Children in the surf, stumbling. Green waves that lope over themselves, toppling like shot horses. Concussion of surf. You sit on the beach in the sand, your pants rolled up to your knees and barefoot. There is a man flying a kite, body arching, dowsing as he tugs on both handled strings, kite dropping in and out of the sun, rippling red and featherless. It is that red patch of kite in the sky. You read about kites soaring, flying, swooping – this wood-splinted pterodactyl of childhood. You try to hear the sound. The sound of polyester and wings. You hear the word soar. It sounds like knotting your fingers through hair, yanking, the sun so close you could almost touch it until wax drips down your arms and off your elbows like the juice of some summer peach. You hear the word swoop. Double Os, implying the prolonged. The twin pod of a word fanning down. Diving until you cut jade out of the green morning by the beach.

The man loses control. Kite drops like a war cry and noses into the sand. Into the sand and whittled grass. The brittleness of the beach, the washed out colors. You hear the approach of driftwood. The white solidifying, cracking across the beach, twisting like kissed necks. You look over at the monstrous femurs of driftwood on the upper beach. The only silent things here. The china surf, glittering and trailing west indies. You hear the word break and crash. Cedars slow in falling. Driftwood broken over your knee. How glass shatters on kitchen floors, the way poured water breaks over a face. Sun-risen lakes broken by skipped stones. Each snow-smoothed stone tonguing one looped syllable of a haiku for trout. The rhythm recycles itself like blood. Shells hump in the low ankle-water, half-chambered, half-spoken. You think about the sound of shells in your hand. Scraping together like dark and dawn, a porcelain sound. Rummage sale of shells, their whiteness flowing in like birdflight, or the pinkness on their undersides, sea curtains, old clay relics. You think about the word of their sound.

And then the children. Their mouths open wide. Stumbling through the surf, letting the tide chase after their feet like an old family dog. You can tell they are screaming. The word scream in the disassociated poppies around the porch, in howler monkeys, in the way continents budge together, pushing at each other until they rise and arch like summer temperatures, in poets in cities. But a child's scream. Falsely endangered. A scream that descends into the cool ultraviolet of laughter, red-shifting as the moment passes. Their rolled up jeans wet. The car on the ride home filled with sand, as if they had been busy all afternoon dismantling the beach. Seagulls rusting above them. Their sound the sound of oceans, of sailors, of tar and wood rot. You've heard it only described as screech, similar to scream. A call. Something that is inherently returned. Stripped from a throat, swelling like blown glass. A knock on the door. The high cheekbone of a seagull call, that peels away the ceiling of the sky, leaving only the remnant canyon of morning. The barn cat of late afternoon. Snoozing, tawny-furred.

The man re-flies the kite.

People walk arm in arm.

There is a bicyclist on a beach cruiser. Her hair in the wind. The sound of the chain on her bicycle or the slip of the pedals. Each toe painted. She is painted like a sailboat. She sails across the shadows of clouds and the sea slips forward on the soft nude shoulders of salt waves. You lean back. You wonder what the wind sounds like. You can feel it in your ears, on your closed eyes, passing through your hair. Whispering. People leaning into one another's ears like dunes. The warm, dabbed smudge of breath against a lobe. Root-noise. Slippers against wood floors, the grain of wood floors. What lips look like when pursed together like buttons. The moccasin closeness of tall grass. Boats through reeds.

You open your eyes. The sky is stitched by thin bales of cloud. The blue fills your eyes. You can't hear anything. There are only caverns. You can feel the sun on your forehead. The way seagulls pass in and out of the light like doubts. Eras of sand and worn rock. You flex your toes and remember for a moment that words are silent. You shape a word in your mouth like a cherry stem as evidence of good kissing. You know what it looks like, what it feels like. You roll over onto your stomach to watch the beach grass. The sandpipers stilted. Deep colors of weariness settling into place. The sound of evening waves approaching behind you, or the angling of shadows, their protractions, obtuse, soundless and stumped. You rub shells together in your hand, waiting for dusk.

They are curled and nautical as inner ears, and echoes. Feeling friction in your hand like a stifled scream, whisper – sun swooping and kite-tailed into the ocean. Silent Daedalus. Speechless sloping waves, troughs and peaks. Avalanche of stillness.