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D. L. Emblen, beach, in English Clear filters

RomanticD. L. Emblen

Souvenir

In an abalone shell I see opalescent sounds and shapes, sunsets, heron plumes, beach fires. I see smoke compacted into panels of pearl, gems from a hidden beach and the swelling breast-line of that beach. And when you dip it full in the surf And hold it quietly in close-cupped hands until the sand settles, I see your oval face, solemn and sweet with the mystic meeting of woman and sea.
ContemplativeD. L. Emblen

Early April, Mission Beach

Alone on the beach the curlews follow in each receding wave, rattling down the smooth incline of glistening sand, spooning the soft slope with long, tube-like bills, grey and brown and white, as the sand is grey and brown and white. The gulls, sleepy and fat, yet watching the curlews fish with a certain belligerance, huddle together, colony-wise, higher up where the dry sand is white as salt. Their heads turn, and the wind tufts their feathers, and they hug the sun-warmed, wind-smoothed sand. Seaweed tumbles in with the surf, the whole brown writhing mass of it turning over with each oncoming and retreating wave. And settling again,
CheerfulD. L. Emblen

Playboy

A small dog on the beach, the long, deserted beach of Neptune Place, where thick flat rocks lie buried in the sand, tossed ashore, abandoned sculpture from an unknown island. The wind has driven bathers from the surf, from the sand bank, from the porches of homes along the street, and the small dog runs in perfect freedom down the hard-packed sand. He chases seagulls and curlews and sandpipers, barking and grinning, showing off his vibrant, frantic body to the waves, wheeling from one shrill-voiced bird to another, like a man with many loves.
AnxiousD. L. Emblen

The Foot of Chalcedony Street and the End of the World

In the Latter Year, when long thin spirals of smoky time trail upward from a desert of remnant artifacts, our beach will be a grinning, lip-less mouth for the skull of a continent. The waves will whisper in and out, hollowly, as Mojave winds flow in and out the sockets of a rabbit skull. The birds will have their beach again, will form along the lacy lines of tiny skeletons and crusted bits of seaweed that mark the circumference of each new effort of the sea, and bloated carcasses of seals may lie there stinking as long as they want.
AnxiousD. L. Emblen

Prophecy?

From the end of the pier beachfires flare in a ragged line, as though an army of barbarians had encamped and was arming for a dawn attack. The yellow cliffs behind mirror the flames and dance with giant shadows, distorted, leaping images, bristling and heavy with weapons, cavemen waiting on some bitter Spanish coast for a tribe of fish-men to leap with hideous cries from the surf. And on the water, flame reflections smear the sliding surface, spreading orange stains, like blood from carnage pits buried at the foot of the waves.
DreamyD. L. Emblen

Beachcomber

I keep finding blue-green bottle buoys, bits of cork and slats bearing oriental characters — remnants of refuse dumped into the Kuro Siwo. And some days there are many chunks of redwood limbs, the shaggy bark worn away, the fibrous wood so steeped in sea water that it can hardly float Whole logs come ashore and broken spars, and once a tumbleweed, fallen from the cliffs at Pt. Concepcion. I never pick up shells anymore, or old shoes or splintered tuna poles or sections of hawsers, mop handles, denim shirts or dead seals. I keep looking for a thick-bottomed, hand-blown flask, one that has bobbed about for eighty-five hundred miles or so, with a note in it from a distressed maiden,
ContemplativeD. L. Emblen

Resident

An old man's cottage on the sand, down off Bacon Street, has a yard of lawn and a pink geranium hedge. They grow and bloom in a three-inch layer of reddish dirt that he has hauled there and spread out on his hands and knees. He lives alone, watching the years' high-water marks advance across the beach, chasing the seagulls out of his garden, befriending the swimmers. After each summer day, after ten hours of sun-glare from the hot, white sand, he sits in an old rocker on the porch and sips lemonade and inhales the coolness of his green backyard and watches the sun dissolve into amber fire and pearl grey smoke along the horizon.
CheerfulD. L. Emblen

Gold Is Where You Find It

It's a poor man on the cliff who cannot harvest gold and silver dreams by nightfall. The joyous, many-cornered sounds of families walking home from long warm days along the beach, carrying inner-tubes and limp towels and remnants of Sunday papers, shiny with sunburn, smiling with the coolness of evening, speak of laughter loosely gathered from the lips of many idle waves, shells and bulbs of kelp, wave-worn sticks and thick green gems of bottles smoothed by countless tidal trips across the beach slope.
CheerfulD. L. Emblen

The Bathers

Landsmen crowd the shore like children at a carnival, exclaiming, pointing seaward, shading their eyes with hands and books. They bring their various lives along, as dangling and cumbersome as folding deck chairs in their arms, as intimately varied as their costumes and as basically the same. Old ladies peer nearsightedly and poke the softer sand with canes, Brown and agile as seals, the younger folk run together quickly; smaller children disappear and reappear, crying with sandy mouths. Fathers shyly step across to the moving edge of surf, and stand there, staring; they look naked and cold in their white skins.
ContemplativeD. L. Emblen

Between Times

As the beach towns sleep, lulled by the surf roar — somehow more distinct at night, yet strangely subdued by dawn — long after the mound of ruby and emerald and diamond lights of Ocean Beach darkens like a pile of cooling coals, a million vari-colored clams stir in the shallow bay, and hold themselves open on taut muscles a million other creatures move about or hide or silently die or give birth. Complex mouths—snail mouths and anemone mouths— open and close in the fluid atmosphere of their underwater places. Crabs crawl from shell to shell; minnows dart through tide pools like silver slivers, frightened by the glint of moonlight on the rocks. A lonely heron rises from the flats,

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