A Day at the Beach

[y66]

A Day at the Beach

 

by Peter Schmitt

 

If he had been paying more attention

to whatever my mother was saying

from under her hat beneath the umbrella,

 

or watching more closely over my brother,

off playing somewhere with his shovel and pail,

or me, idly tracing my name in the sand,

 

if he hadn't had that faraway look,

gazing out to where the freighters crawled along

the horizon – so that when he suddenly

 

pushed up and off, sand in his wake, visor

taking wing behind him, you could believe,

as he churned toward the glassy water,

 

that it had just come to him to chuck it all,

this whole idea of family, and make

for those southbound freighters and the islands –

 

then he might have never seen the arm heaved up,

the lifeguards running just as my father

was lifting the old man out of the surf

 

and bearing him ashore, the blue receding

from his cramped limbs. And as a crowd closed around

the gasping figure struggling to his knees,

 

my father turned back to us – sheepishly,

almost, back to the endless vigilance

of husband and of father, which was all

 

he had ever asked for in the first place.

 

from Hazard Duty. © Copper Beach Press, 1995. Reprinted with permission at The Writer's Almanac.