Thought 1

A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach
by Fleda Brown


Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam

and algae makes one green smell together. It clears

my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own



skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first

day here, there was nobody, from one distance

to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam,



dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of

were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest

motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab



shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty,

and another, and another. I walked miles, holding

my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding



a package for somebody else who would come back

like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened

wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks.



Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats,

arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy

in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making



intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought

he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had

all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.




From Do Not Peel the Birches by Fleda Brown. Copyright © 1993 by Fleda Brown. Reprinted with permission of the author and Purdue University Press. All rights reserved.