Bathing
Beauties
Del
Mar Beach,
California
I.
Slipping
sideways under Cinzano umbrellas,
afternoon
sun hammers ice
through
thin walls of tonic glasses,
extruding
beads of lime sweat.
Greased
bodies sizzle,
layed
out along the griddle
that
is the continent’s edge:
so
much sexual bacon.
In
the outdoor shower,
bikinied
teens preen.
At
the steps to the beach,
where
everyone can see,
a
couple stand
so
everyone can see.
He
is tall, blond,
tan,
seventeen.
His
muscles are from play,
for
playing with:
not
from work,
not
for working with.
She
is shorter, blonde,
nubile,
fourteen.
She
wears four small triangles
of
blue cloth.
She
wears her self-assurance
as
if she had already done everything
the
older men under the Cinzano umbrellas
are
wishing they could do with her
and
found it amusing.
She
tosses her hair,
turning
to devour
the
stares
that
are devouring her.
II.
She
is eighty.
She
walks with a cane.
She
has trouble with the sand.
At
the other end of her life,
the
soft girl’s bones of her feet were
broken,
toes bent back under the arch
to
form the desired opening
for
a highborn man’s erection, then bound
to
heal, if that is the right word, into
a
different kind of foot.
They
are still bound,
her
childhood trapped there
like
butterflies pressed
in
a book.
You
can see
she
loves the sun.
She
walks carefully
past
the perfect couple
past
the sizzling Californians
lifting
her withered face
pushing
the cane with withered hands
down
to where the salt foam
washes
her shortened feet,
down
to where one wave’s foam
smoothes
the sand with its coming,
withers
the same sand with its leaving,
the
withered sand a mirror to her skin.
She
lifts her face
smiles
into the sun
smiles
toward the West,
toward
China.
©2012 Dean Metcalf
P.O.
Box 548
Joseph
OR 97846
