That one morsel
Where the camera holds its gaze

Just long enough

No matter how grey the film

How dreary the vista

To a time suspended in flight
Where there is nothing other
than myself and a vacation

Full of the lack of fortitude

I focus just long enough

Over the hills that are ocean waves,
Over the slow relief of a tombstone sea

To see what should not have been

Something so clear I cry
As if that pool filled with the tears of others
When I was too young to understand
That death was a permanent state

Of being

He waved goodbye to his grandmother

What I saw despite
my own little world

For I played poolside
With grains of sand from my plastic bucket
And shovel that had earlier

Dug quite deep

Unearthing an afternoon soul
Of bodies under sand
Castles built upon them

A crude foreshadowing of the inevitable

Each of our times

The shovel was green
My aura
Only a darker shade
Of plot luck memory

He dove in wearing a mask
An icarus seeking a cooling
A splash

Of charred memory

He rose to the surface
As I cooled my sandburnt feet

pool side

Unaware I was standing
Where the pools of others

Would be

For a very long time

My watery dreams
Submerged me
In all of this

But it was only a pool

And this, only a vacation

My only memory of a cold summer