Friday Poem:"Empty Orchestra"

This poem is based in a vivid experience I had with my friends in Topsail Beach, North Carolina, back in my college days. Every summer my parents would rent a cottage on Topsail Island, and as the years went on, the house and the guest list got larger; one year there were 15 of us in the house, my brother and I each bringing five friends. We discovered that summer that running out on the beach at midnight had an immersive upside-down effect.

Empty Orchestra

Take delicate steps.  The sea has yet to grind these shells to powder—
the ribs of a scallop can peel a toe-knuckle in the dark. 

No one is wearing anything you can tear into strips for a bandage.  
Aim your body North but watch the moon, white as a coma, 

endlessly dribbling light on the surface of the water, 
until the muscles of your neck will not unturn.

Say nothing but your lines.  Eat the dark and spit it out again—
half your words lost, gibbering away into the salt breeze.

Find the flat sand, hallucinate a ghost crab, or find one to step on. 
Slap your feet, dig with each footfall.  Your heels will juice the cold sand. 

Watch someone’s footprints glitter briefly in starlight and go dry.
Fling a lit matchbook into the surf.  Your pupils may feel 

half-dollar-sized, apertures stretching to catch the glimmer of the galaxy 
dumped in pale grains across the black; try not to see the smudged figures

hovering on the sand in front of you, the wiggle of surf rods’
phosphorescent tips, the sparked orange of cigarette-pulls.

Stifle your shriek when the voice comes: “Watch out for the shark.”
Control the spin of all the fainting light as someone cuts on a lamp

beams a four-foot fish in a shallow pit:  blue-gray, dredged
in the dry sand, crumbs clinging to its eyes, it will thrash toward you

once and open its mouth, a frown of sawblades.  
Be still.  Extinguish lights.  Move on.  Step soberly, whisper your cues:

the surf murmurs like a crowd, hisses disapproval,
rises like a symphony finding A, then snares a steady drumroll.  

Throw yourself into the sand, roll there, feel the grit in your hair, 
between your legs, in your mouth.  Stop.  Be silent.

The stage stretches on and on, the curtain is up, you are before
the beginning and the end of everything.  Wait for your spotlight.    

This poem appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal Vol. 50, No. 2.