Hoyt Rogers
Shore
A scraggly path wavers from the village, angles
up a boulder-warped slope, unravels to seaward
on bluffs that claw the waves with splayed, volcanic fingers,
lichened and gnarled: La Mano de Dios, webbed by beaches
each a planet to itself, khaki and rough, pebbly and white,
sifted and pink, greenish and ribbed with shells, the god’s
glove that tossed us towards the whale-shaped islands,
swimming half-dazed from these coves, fire-blindered,
lured by the vibrating sun. But today, in this wild-eyed noon, who
would dare? Breakers hurtle against their sandbars like penned-up
beasts, slobbering offal of coral and kelp. And so we sidle
down the thumb to Playa Caracol, swerving along its buff,
stubbly nail to a far-flaring spit of powdered sand, streaked
with grey and cream. Assent, yes here no mind-mire slough
is ever deep enough to cast us down, once we round this bend
and drink the mountains, inlets, serrated cliffs in a single gulp:
all the flung bay under quivering mists, brimming from translucent,
low-keeled clouds. We mold our singsong pace to the suave curves
of the palm-fringed bight, weaving past cove after cove
till we reach our cabin, built by your arms for us to live
a time of illusion, log-pillars lifted, dragon tiles of a two-tier roof,
a mythic pagoda wheeling on the waves, the only house for miles
of inviolate shore...
Look, our love is striding with us as a third
gutted soul: we speed past our tumbledown folly under a fierce
sunburst, baking our bones from within, pricking our skin
till we breach the two rivers, black and white, darkly bled
from mangrove roots, spring-gushed from limestone vaults,
night-stream, day-stream marbling to dusk at ocean’s brink;
and drunken, reeling in the bottom-muck, we ford the currents
where Río Negro, Río Blanco intertwine with saltwater shoals,
gates to a coast that billows in sketchy arcs, patchworks of mica-
speckled sand. Abruptly, a storm’s in the offing: its sooty cordon
swings on the horizon in plait-knotted swells; and though we slog
in clammy torpor here below, far above a whirling, buzz-saw gale
shreds the clouds into banners of ebbing light. They clarion-blare
us onward an hour, then flag at Río Frío, the strand’s most hidden
creek, plashing up from artesian wells, carving out over eons
the trapezoidal pool, ringed by sedges and reeds, where flesh
eclipsed us as our horse rummaged on, nuzzling the grass
with her incurious gaze; and eros dealt us an ever-bluffed
mirage as we paddled in the surf, dipped in the shivery brook,
braised on the heat-skewered dunes, till buoyed up by lanterns
of night we cantered to bed, bareback on our mare, naked
as the instant we were born, lolloping through quicksilver
palms.
But now, as we plot our drowned, jagging path
among moss-slick stones, whispers from the past flow
cold, the foam glitters at me spitefully, my memories of you
straddle my shoulders, beat me down as I fumble, lurch, fall
on the other bank where both of us are only shades;
as I hold your body with all of mine in a final hoax,
upending the order of years, until we discard
those sharp-minted shadows cut by the moon
we played on this shore like a game
of hearts, and admit once and for all
that both of us have lost.
