inheritance

gonna post this old poem, be­cause to­day I think we found the spot that I have dreamt about hun­dreds and hun­dreds of times.
 

Ro­mance per­haps was not yet con­ceived of, let alone myself,
when my par­ents in hats and se­ri­ous pos­tures, af­ter­nooned on the cliffs of San­tander, Spain, held fast in an in­de­pen­dent light I equate, for some rea­son, with the fifties.
My fa­ther was paint­ing, my moth­er, hold­ing her hat against a breeze,
study­ing the sep­a­ra­tion of sky and sea.
 

Years lat­er and of­ten I was told how the wave, al­ready huge,
seemed to mount over the hori­zon as over the edge of the earth
and be­fore they had a name for the size of it, it was on them
and they were dragged un­der, skin and nails on rocks,
                         dense wa­ter forc­ing over and over them
un­til their bod­ies, each, apart, seemed to lose all form and dis­tinc­tion but that of the breaths
held against the end.
 

It hap­pens again and again and again.
I am on a beach.   My dream’s hand holds a shell: opales­cent, cold.
I study it care­ful­ly.   I note its sweet size, its ten­der weight,
                         each grain of sand lin­ing its bumpy, lu­nar rim,
each gra­da­tion of wet, pearl pink.
It lets go a drop and I men­tion to my­self how it looks, how it feels this cold tear
trac­ing down my wrist
as the beach be­low be­gins to rush
sucked out from un­der me.
 

I don’t need to look up. I think,
It will hit me be­fore I turn the shell,
be­fore I can be sure there is nothing
hid­ing inside.
 
 

—lau­ra hohlwein

Flom­mist Lau­ra Hohlwein is a con­tem­po­rary ab­stract sur­re­al­ist. Copy­right © 2018 Lau­ra Hohlwein.

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