What Is It

It is not the scenery that surrounds you

that momentarily eviscerates your idea of home,

it is the missives from that home

that delineates the scenery that surrounds you.

What notion of paradise you might hold

stripped by the longing – “Come baaaaaack!!!!” –

in the notes you long for, in the notes

that make you shudder upon receipt.

You might walk on the pounded murky lava sand

   wondering at the amount of dye involved

   in the shading of the water, land-locked

   you, so normally surrounded by flat,

by brown, by the dander of the cottonwood.

Land-locked, unparadised you might

stand, fruitlessly, under a shallow palm tree

looking up for fruit it does not bear.

The resort’s façade might give pause –

   you, too, resort to something, sometimes –

and you wonder that they don’t call it a repose,

although that also brings its troubles.

Somehow the heightened heat back home,

remember:  left behind, is to be blamed

on your leaving, on your absence,

as is the desertion of a trust,

as is the baseness of all the expected places,

   of all the expected faces

you see on an all too often basis.

The pictures you send – of sunsets, of sunrises,

of turtles (ho’nu) at bask, of dolphin at play,

of flamingos in repose – aren’t really making

your case that it’s a shame

that the sand is scarce and gray,

that the riptide makes the ocean unventureable,

that the mix of moonscape and tropic is unsettling,

that your trip was off-season for watching whale.

“Come baaaaack!!!!”

Everything is upside down, where you are

   to where you want to be,

you might look at the cresting waves,

and with everything turned asunder,

you might resort, in a state of repose,

allowing the crystal-sharp sand to cover your toes,

to wonder, Will it?

Will it really pull me under?

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas