I do not know
Who you are anymore,
My troubled, first-born son.
What coarse and hoary thoughts
Are intertwining now
With your pink and healthy ones?
We walk together along the beach,
And we talk in airy pleasantries,
Skimming over the rough and foamy waters of black,
Like a small, flattened stone.
Someday,I think to myself,
I must unwind the toughened seaweed,
And hold you, a shivering tadpole,
Tightly, never letting go.
But then I touch you,
And you pull away from me.
So here I stand, knee-deep
In sun-baked, pallid sand,
Holding nothing,
But a plastic bucket of brine.
Jane Wanklin,
1997.