Poems of Richard Blanco in Place of Mind

Some Days the Sea

The sea is never the same twice. Some days
the waves open like lions’ mouths hungry
for the shore and I feel the earth helpless.
Some days their foamy edges skim over my feet
gentle as lace, and the sea is a still, green desert.
Some mornings the shore is dotted with souvenirs
from a storm: I sift through spoils of sea grass,
find a purple fan or crooked finger of coral,
examine the hollow throat of a sponge, watch
the last few shimmers of a dying man-of-war
lodged in the sand like a pale sapphire. But
some mornings there’s nothing, only the sand
quite as snow, I walk with my eyes on the wind
that is sometimes laden with salt and tastes
like silver, sometimes dry and quite as the sun.
Some days the sun is the color of honey, light
raining on the sea glinting like diamond dust,
and other days there’s only clouds, clouds—
sometimes solid and drifting like continents
across the sky, as quietly as my father’s life,
other times wispy and swirling into white roses,
into tigers, cathedrals. I watch them, remember
I too am never the same. Some days I’m a boy
on this beach, still wanting to catch a seagull,
cup a tiny silver fish, build a perfect sand castle.
Some days I’m a teenager defying of death
even as I watch the waves sink into nothing.
Most days I’m a man tired of being a man,
sleeping in the care of dusk’s slanted light,
or a man scared of being a man, looking for God
in the streams of moonlight through the sea.
Some days I imagine myself walking this shore
with feet as worn as driftwood, old and afraid
of my body. Someday, I suppose I will return
like a wave seeping through the sand, back
to the sea without memory of being here, but
if I could choose my eternity, today I’d remain
aging with the moon, enduring in the space
between every grain of sand, and in the cusp
of every wave and every seashell’s hollow.

John Bailly, Guantanamo, 2007

Richard Blanco was "made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States," where he was raised in Miami. A builder of bridges and poems, Blanco earned a BS in Civil Engineering and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University. His acclaimed first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, explores the negotiation of cultural identity as a Cuban-American. His second book, Directions to the Beach of the Dead, continues to explore themes of home, place, and identity.

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Richard Blanco *** Place of Mind *** John Bailly