I’m in a cabana on a beach in Cancún looking
upon light-blue water so warm you can walk
right in, no need to adjust to the temperature.
And isn’t this the dream? The thing for which
we work, the reason for college, grad school,
Marriage, family, a job—to afford an $800 / night
all-inclusive resort? To stretch out in the heat
Without a trouble in the world, your son forming
perhaps those first memories he’ll look back on
in later life, full of melancholy for childhood, for
learning to swim with his grandparents whose
love he will cherish long after they have passed?
Trouble is, the gears of my worrying mind won’t
stop, even here. I know why the sea is 84 degrees,
the economics of everything-included. I wonder
what the Yucatán Jays make of me, circling above
like Gods surveying the fallen world they birthed.
Do they demand a sacrifice for these gifts so
unjustly bestowed? What use are they to me, or I
to them, if I do not swim out beyond the pier until I am
become horizon, no less flawed for being unreachable?
