Donna Hilbert from the Peninsula on Summers of Swimming, Dreaming and Books

I still like to spend my summers in the way that I spent them as a child in the hot San Fernando Valley:  reading, swimming and daydreaming.  Nothing else interests me—certainly not work, shopping or chores.  What has changed is that now that I live on the peninsula, it is easy to find a cool place to read, and when the temperature in the bay reaches the high sixties, I have a good place to swim.  I don’t get much writing done in the summer, but I tell myself that I am storing experiences that will become the basis for new work.  And, it is true; I recently gave a public reading of poems whose genesis was summer, but few were about the weather.  The change of scene that summer often affords helps the writer to see life from a different angle.  Here is a summer poem by Tamara Madison from her new book Wild Domestic.  The publication party for Wild Domestic will be Friday, August 5^th, 7:P.M. at the Starling Diner, 4114 E. Third Street, Long Beach.  You are invited!

 

Keys

            (Big Sur, California)

 

In the photo my children

run along a wet shoreline

on a bright day of whipping winds.

Jagged cliffs of red stone and grey

rise like bleachers

above the flinging sand.

 

He is the young man in baggy shorts

and sunglasses, hair flying,

grinning wide as he runs,

leggy sister on his back.

Her hood tied round her face

is like a mouth pronouncing “cow,”

but you can see in the narrow patch

of light that shows only a peek of nose,

the inner corners of eyes, a touch

of upper lip, that she is grinning too.

Her legs dangling through his pocketed arms

are bare, strong-calved in blue gym shoes.

 

He has not yet climbed

the rocky island that rises unseen

behind them in the greenwhite frothing

surf, and I do not yet know

that my keys lie somewhere hidden

beneath the blowing sand,

that it will take an hour of worry,

the help of strangers, and finally,

an unbeliever’s desperate plea

to Saint Anthony before the wind

will part the sand to reveal them,

the keys to everything else

that seems important in my life.