Search

Search results

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

AnxiousD. L. Emblen

Supper on the Beach

The flickering shadows of many myths still dance, like candle flames, along the inner walls of sea caves. For there, by the light of dying beachfires, where men and women of this country have come in the evening since the discoverers, the darkness booms from the crash of unseen waves against the ends of subterranean passageways. Babies cry and lovers draw together, half in fun, half in unexplainable fear. And old people poke the fire and look about, as though they were looking for lost children. The darkness booms, the darkness whistles suddenly when small tatters of wind are drawn between eroded fissures of the rock. They tell of long lost treasure hidden there, of guardian ghosts,
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.
AnxiousD. L. Emblen

Lovers' Leap

The crumbling lip of cliff — sandy loam, white-flecked with bits of shells held together loosely by a threadbare mat of wild grasses— tips seaward brokenly, sagging on a limestone hinge. Nettles grow like lost and ragged flowers on a sifting ledge that trickles crumbs of earth deep into a concave vault of sea -mist. Here is a resting place for gulls who stand on wide-webbed feet and listen solemnly to wind and trickling sand and hissing spray. Here is a place for lovers' last long argument, a narrow place for pacing, a half-round stone for resting on, a dark and grinning crevice, widening to draw the hot dry eyes, and a yielding sod
AnxiousD. L. Emblen

Low Tide from Crystal Pier

Flat as a dish, the sand hard-packed and shining extends from shore to surf-edge, further and wider with each half-hour of retreating tide, until the bathers look like dolls bobbing about in the mounds and sheets of moving water. The lifeguard stares and squints into the sun, it is hard to tell a lump of kelp from a swimmer's head, and there in the black-tarred piling of the pier, many a small life might scream for help. How would it sound, here in this warm, concave afternoon, with the sea-air filled with the barking of dogs, shouting of children, squealing of girls, blare of a radio, and the long, continuous thunder of the sea?

Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem

Or try: