Folly Beach

September 4, 2022

Folly Beach, SC. Arrival pretty much as it has been for three years, me honoring traditions set long before me. Tried unsuccessfully to fight off sleep in the car. DJ exceptionally voluble. By night on the balcony we watched Antares and Jupiter ride a sky ruled by the half moon. There are two beds in my bedroom. I tried the first, and no sooner had I lain down that visions popped into my head of a derelict pirate ship washed up on shore. I tried to explore, and as I did, ghosts of men who’d died in the brig emerged to tell me their stories. The bed was haunted, so I moved across the room, to one suitably inert. Pulled the Venetian blinds down trying to close them. Stuff pillows in the window so my named self can’t be seen from the back terrace. Sat in the blinding morning light on our balcony and wrote poems. Going to dare myself to at least a poem a day. 

Wandered into the sea amid the late morning holiday crowd. Happy feeling. Saw a small fish, almost transparent, at the edge of the waves. There are waves of the sea perpendicular to those coming onshore, which are warm and cold. Babies held by parents, dangling their feet in the water