You are an amnesia:
forgiveness at the baptismal font.
Still I wish I were eidetic.
I’ve never seen these shores.
Mountains shrouded in evening fog,
sunlight a specter behind ghastly veil.
Overhead and all around
the squawking carries a salty seaside eulogy.
She sees Smokey on a sign and says the dust is hazardous;
I look up to the palms and see pyres.
Everything I know about California I read on Wikipedia,
amorphously recalling Manifest Destiny from the public school pulpit
but only Thomas Nagel could ever tell me about first seeing both coasts.
What I’m getting at is the mystical conception of atonement that walks on the water,
a sight more precious and realer still than the heads that turn in search of dolphins.
Our god is a water god.
All this and more:
parabolic waves that tickle my toes.
I am brisk, half-naked and brisk.
My shirt is a shiver in this Galilean drizzle.
Pebbles and broken bottle tops underfoot when my ankles start to sink.
Knees soon, then now.
White knuckles strike at fish like a matchbox undercurrent.
Andy Dufresne said the pacific – peaceful – has no memory.
When I pray the sinner’s prayer who is forgetting?
And just as I pray in the morning I will return to the altar every March for believer’s baptism,
bending at the knee with grit in my mouth
and grains between the teeth.
Knock me down, knock me down –
my back to the waves now.
Just knock me down and I’ll do the rest.
I stand up eyes half shut without air in my chest
and a mind ever lighter.