He gazes unto the distance
The bright rays of the midday sun dance upon the foamy
     waves

Fish leap midair in the nude, the radio warns
Of another medium typhoon brewing in the wake of a lesser      tropical storm
A lonely retreat at the beach house

Bay windows dressed in airy curtains resembling the flowing
     gown of a lady—
Tracing her neckline to her soft, smooth shoulders
Following her curves to her abdominal mound
Heated passion fanned by the wind, even the eyelids break
     into a sweat
No place for the watery allure of woman, under the blinding
     sun

He lowers his head and types on the keyboard of his laptop
A poem—strung together from one correspondence
     after another
Like random imprints left by bare feet on the beach
Like the wail of the seasonal wind
Echoing over endless desert dunes

Viewing the ocean from a different angle he spies The rays of the afternoon sun stroking the wind’s
     slender waist
With the ocean leaning against the wind the wind leaning
     against the sun and the sun leaning against the clear
     blue skies
The world becomes a book tilted at an angle
And the words of his poem slide into the sea

He knows not how to retrieve the fresh verses fallen
     overboard
Each letter rides a wave into the distance
Each wave then quickly washes ashore a letter from afar
Letters clamoring with the echo of tide, words drenched in
     a loneliness that does not wash off
The sea morphs into a splashing poem

He labors on with his unfinished sentences
Which end up as wave after wave of foamy surf lapping on
     his inbox;
Finally the sea transforms from peacock blue to Prussian
     blue
A lady in a beach hat turns sideways
To reveal her shapely forehead and vague and
     unfathomable
Blue eyes—as the mellow sunset illuminates the curve of
     her bare back

At that instant his verses melt into the night
The ocean surf raises a thousand hands to wave toward the
     shore
Slowly sea and sky come together—slowly sky presses
     against sea sea presses against sky
Until little remains save the hills translated by the sprawling
     lights
Little survives except for the serpent so extolled by D.H.
     Lawrence
Bodhisattva Kuan-yin incarnate, no doubt—the serpent
     swims into his now invisible poem