Kafka on the Beach

I cannot imagine him on a beach,
in a bathing suit, under an umbrella.
He seems always on shore, in Prague,
sitting at a desk writing another story
or writing a letter to a woman

who would never answer or marry him.
Though, perhaps, I can see him walking
at the very edge of an ocean
contemplating all of it and knowing none –
a horizon that is not the end.

Though I have been a reader of Franz Kafka for many years, I was inspired for this poem by just seeing on a bookstore shelf the cover of Kafka on the Shore (海辺のカフカ, Umibe no Kafuka), a 2002 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

Salted Breeze

Something about this salted breeze blowing in
the curtain on the bedroom window that
looks out on the dark, calm sea.
Something that I can’t quite write down
for you in a way you’d understand.

Is it that the sea’s salt water,
or that in sweat or tears, contains
something that ultimately heals or relieves us?
Is it this breath of the world
mixing with my own somehow revives me?

There Is a Field I’m Standing In

between my last poem in my backyard
and the Atlantic Ocean in my next poem
that is just blooming with spring wildflowers,
and I can’t write a poem about what it means.

There is something happening here.
The wind is trying to rustle the flowers
and tell me something.
Birds are singing to me.
Bees are pointing to one bloom after another,
and still, I fail to hear the message clearly.

It is connected to the way the Sun
appears and disappears behind clouds,
why I am alone here, why I smell ocean,
how my eyes are open and I still can’t see.

Photo: Kristina PaukshtitePexels.com

Estuary

Like the mixing salt and fresh water

making it not favorable for either species,

we have come to a brackish place —

marsh grass obscuring our view, and we,

like young crabs, hiding from imagined predators.