The One You Love's Voice

It feels gloomy today. The Great Ducknik was up during the night, so she logged on to check BZ's Amsterdam-Nairobi flight: in progress. In Africa until July. Isabella's probably already playing on the beach and eating more bananas. Maybe even mangoes. In Mexico until next week. The Great Large Pants is leaving for Provincetown for the summer, so Tiapos will be a lonelier place, with only Plotnik to keep the other writers from lapsing into discussions of whose new shoes. Gone until September. Kobe asking to be traded. Still not gone, though.

Maybe PD and 5H are on the beach this morning, feeling blissed out like in Billy Collins's poem 'Bermuda':

"When we walk down the bleached-out wooden stairs
to the beach and lie on our backs
on the blue and white chaises
near the edge of the water
on this dot in the atlas
this single button on the blazer of the sea,
we come about as close
as a man and woman come
to doing nothing."

Of course, it's Billy Collins, so this bliss turns bleak at the end. He says:

"...as if every day we were not running
like the solitary runners on the beach
toward a darkness without shape
or waves, crosses or clouds,

as if one of us is not likely to get there first
leaving the other behind,
castaway on an island
with no pink houses or blue shutters,
no plum-colored ones trimmed in cream,
no offshore reef to burst the waves into foam,
and no familiar voice being bent in the wind."

Billy Collins's poems are probably laughed at by the poetry intelligentsia, because they are too easily understood, but he gets to The Great Plotnik, who used to dream about taking the last bus to the very end of the line and being forced to get off into a strange, dark place -- hmmm, it's the same beach, isn't it...

But that image -- the priceless timbre of the one you love's voice - there's a song there, for sure.