chunks of flommus
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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