Writing in Wet Sand

The stylus of a wet stick
wound with clingy seaweed.

Mercurial caduceus.

The childish urge to write--
wet concrete in a graveyard!

Magic tablet
you had at seven...

Lift the plastic sheet
& beautiful amnesia

reigns anew. God most
choosy mothers choose anyway.

Eventually. For themselves
or their lost children,

who later find themselves
on this beach. Foam

hisses over naked toes
and you commit to nothing

what you think. The poem
makes its stand against you,

sides with the darkness
that comes inside a wave

to take it. It was always
choosing its family elsewhere

anyway. You did the same.
Why would you expect anything

different? It's staying that's betrayal
in this strange marriage.

It's an animal in the end.
Everyone's an animal in the end.

And that's the beauty of betrayal,
the thing swimming quickly away

from you, as if its life
depended on it.