Under a large blue umbrella, I skip a small stone across the surf, I lie down on the damp sand These thoughts bloom, languish, and dissipate into the air, About the Author Peter Schireson grew up in California, studied at UC Berkeley, University of Victoria, and Harvard University. After retiring from a career, first in education and later in business, he returned to school to earn an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He has published six volumes of poems. He has trained in Zen in both the US and Japan, and is married to the psychologist and Zen teacher, Grace Jill Schireson. They live in Palm Springs, California with their small dog, Dewey. Some of Peter’s writing and paintings are at http://www.peterschireson.com.
Beach
a clutch of young girls singing intently,
as if rehearsing for something,
birthing a freshness into the air,
a cheerful vapor, in the way a baby
smells of milk, blameless, chaste.
a sole white sea bird slips through the limpid air,
the girls drift off toward the parking lot.
Dusk descends, Venus ambles across the sky,
and I feel as if the evening is passing through me,
hurrying to get somewhere else.
and peer out past the bottle-green shallows
to the horizon where a wall of rain has formed
and begun heading for shore.
I listen to the soft hiss of time as it
mixes with the surf, passing and opening out
into emptiness, like pigment passing from the petal.
the sand beneath me breathes its humid breath,
the spread sky sparkles like an immense city of glass.
