Charles D. Tarlton
Down by the Seaside, by the Beautiful Sea
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. —Revelation 20:13
Somewhere a man stares out a small apartment window at the City. He counts the stoplights changing from green to yellow to red to green again and turns back to reading the news on his laptop, growing more and more weary until, finally, he types—“seafront properties in Maine” in the search bar. . . and now he dreams he’s just getting home from work and he walks down the simple wooden staircase to the seaside cabin. The air is fresh and smells of the sea. He pauses to gaze at the scene, then he goes in through the door and his wife greets him with a kiss. He can smell the fish stew on the stove and see panels of blue ocean through the curtainless front windows.
everyone who sees
“for sale” signs down at the beach
can’t help imagine
their life entirely new
always walking on the sand
The driveway ran from the Boston Post Road down to the water. It was little more than a pair of wheel tracks, some of it actually in sand. The Realtor’s sign on the highway read “Ocean Front House for Sale.” He turned in without signaling his intention and she was at first startled and then delighted. Living at the beach was their one big fantasy, but right now they just didn’t have the money. As they approached the grey shingled bungalow he was surprised to see people on the porch. He’d assumed it would be empty. “I don’t think we’d better go any closer,” he said. “You’re probably right,” she said, her voice trailing off.
once on the Costa
del Sol they’d thought hard about
the little houses
for sale on the curving beach
“when would we ever use it?”
If I drowned here in fierce notorious currents, and my hair, my swollen blue eyes lay clutched by seaweed haptera on the still-wet sand at the top of the swash, among salt-drilled black stones and the shells left by hungry gulls, children might use me in sandcastles, dream me into their wet dungeons, long forgotten.
he held the woman’s
head in his lap and watched
the dawn edging in
dark red and black at first
fading to a yellow-blue
As the tide eases up the beach, old women in slouchy bathing suits sit partly on the sand and partly in the water that sloshes in and out and threatens to surround them, to pull the sand, grain by grain, from under them, as if to drag their loose bosoms and wrinkled legs out to sea. They are on every beach, these women, mothers spinsters and widows, left behind in any case, remembering tighter bodies, happier times of frolic and faux-seductions in the waves.
my mother never
got a sunburn though she
used straight olive oil
on her skin. She turned very
dark for a real Norwegian
The push and pull of the tide is an indifferent force, a calculation of the earth entire and of the moon, as they circle each other in the airless universe. And the sun from the center looking down is burning.
On hot summer days, climbing down the rocky path to the beach, I have felt the sea furtive where it strains to meet the sand and finally falls away. There are those who say we came from the sea, and that from some deep, simple, and primitive center we long to return. But, that’s not really it. One taste of briney sea water confirms we are oxygen suckers from the dry land. And in our desert days, distant from the sea’s romance, only the wind and the rough horned toads required commemoration in words. Horned toads, lizards, yucca, and the sun-boiled rocks that suck the water from the air. This is where we had all been first arranged.
in the desert where
once there was the green sea
fossils and reptiles
swim through the blowing sands
surf on the crest of the wind
The beach, the dunes, sea-roses and sea-grasses, an ocean in constant movement, and the hot sun are like deities, imagined but unknown. We fabricate stories of their mischief to make them (and the sea itself) more familiar, less terrifying.
We sat at the window, looking out at the wild surf where, swimming in the waves and from a hovering helicopter, lifeguards searched vainly for a drowned man. He’d rushed in and been swept out on the riptide. Was he escaping from our ordered element, trying to reclaim the fish’s sea? We have seen cliffs that the land had lost to the sea, the waves breaking over them and pulling them down. A wordless theater of crashes and long sucking sounds. The water rises, stirred by the indifferent shifting of the earth.
Can you remember beaches at each stage of your life? Beaches in black and white summer snapshots, the funny poses in bathing suits, on the running boards of old cars? Or the beaches in movies, say, or glamourous beaches and lifeguards, or in newsreels of amphibious landings, or the broken hull of a steamer spilling its contents into the surf, the locals dragging suitcases and pianos onto the beach?
the sea is a real
boundary. We come up to it
and stop. Whatever
lies beyond the beach confronts
us with things primeval
About the Author
Charles D. Tarlton is a retired professor who lives and writes (now) in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter.