… soon, for two weeks. She’ll be there with her sister and her daughter while Mr UD is in Boston at the Tufts University Institute of Civic Studies.
Her blogs, University Diaries, and University Diaries at Inside Higher Education, continue, in the salt sea air.
UD‘s earlier stays in Rehoboth are chronicled here.
Here are few lines from Rehoboth Beach.
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A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach
Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam
and algae makes one green smell together. It clears
my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own
skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first
day here, there was nobody, from one distance
to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam,
dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of
were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest
motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab
shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty,
and another, and another. I walked miles, holding
my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding
a package for somebody else who would come back
like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened
wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks.
Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats,
arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy
in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making
intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought
he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had
all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.
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An elegantly outfitted seaside poem. The writer sends a few lines to a friend, presumably a rather concerned friend, since the writer seems to have gone to the beach off-season in order to recompose herself after a trauma.
The engrossing drama, power, and simplicity of the setting distracts her from herself, and clears her head. She wants to be like a surfer, alone, balanced upright on troubled waters, and concentrating on nothing but balancing, on nothing but negotiating the waves. She’s after a brave and redemptive form of simplicity, one that gathers up the fragments of the self into one “smooth stand.”
But she’s not there yet – the tired jetty, the frail egg sack, these convey the writer’s exhaustion and frailty on her first dark March day at the beach. In the darkness, she walks off – tries to walk off – her suffering, all the while deriving some sense of inner order from hymns. Singing to the waves, like the singer in The Idea of Order at Key West, she tries to generate a kind of counterpoint to her inner discord.
And indeed the next day is much better; the sun’s come out, and the gulls don’t even need two legs to stay upright. making / intricate moves against the March ice-water is a gorgeous line, with its alliterative M’s and its use of the greatly poetic word “intricate.” (“Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring / In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring / Intricate rented world begins to rouse.”) And it carries the point of the poem as well, this line, the idea that her emptied, simplified, calmed self is the start of her mending, and that eventually she may become, like the surfer, capable not merely of simple balance, but intricate moves over the perilous surface of life.
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I like everything about Rehoboth, but
especially, as longtime readers know,
its beach stones.