How we came to this

Il Mare Dolce

We stand on the beach in black ascots dawned with white linen finely tailored before dead-eyed monsters netted in the sand. Tangled by such perfect curls in our hair, the wind turns an impeccable razor lashing the scalp with anemone whips, we puzzle at how we came to this. Its stench overfumes us as we recoil to rip the tide from the roots of what horrors glide beneath all we dare not imagine. What wrought this thing, this flat-nosed revulsion of gaped teeth and crab-bitten saltrubber, thought enough of its maldesign to throw it up onto the littoral as a shock, perhaps, to whatever might pass it by as if it were the only exiled monster of such frivolous making?

 

The sweet life was always like this. It was dulced words lost on honeyconch ears, a young girl calling from twelve sands away saying, Remember me? Dancing on the stones of the café courtyard to a poppied theme by Nino Rota? and, of course, you don’t because wine and work and beery headstorm have taken it all for the passing moment and there’s simply not enough dots left to shape the morning. Yes, these were the sweetest lives we could muster, endless cigarettes bouncing on pouty red lips like a diver testing the gravity of smoky poolwater, taking her sweet time as if she had tingled eons of it left to swan with as she sweetly pleased.

 

Someone always comes for us, goading by the elbow, prodding to breakfast or church, the day unlingering for any longer than you can get into what it will have you do whether or not you wish to. It’s a tug, it’s a push, a pull or a yank, a foot to the backside of an easy chair that plops you over and onto finned feet for to walk you must first swim the reasons for doing so. This is where the fathoms live and you will come, in time, to know that quite well. You will look up, as will I, to see blurry faces looking down at the shrunken monster you’ve become, a poor stunt of vulcanized stealth that cannot direct purpose to canonize or cannibalize for both are equal in the black eyes that gaze within you now on that beach of sweet sweet ebbsand. 

Joseph Gallo 
April 17, 2012