I Imagine

I imagine one more holiday.
My mother sits at a large picture window
looking out over a broad beach,
watching dogs fetching sticks.
Then, because she cannot help it,
she takes her shoes off and walks out the door.

I imagine her  sighting the offshore rock
where puffins nest.
I imagine footprints–hers and mine
and the paw prints of the dog–
someone else’s–
who joins us for the price of a stick thrown
over and over into the waves.

My mother could count her trips to the beach
on one hand,
and most of those times have been with me.
Once, in Wales, we sat on the long sea wall
under Dylan Thomas’s boathouse.
A cat walked the wall out to us,
precise and careful
to get as few grains of sand as possible
between its paw pads.
Preening and arching under my mother’s smooth hand,
it’s black hairs caught in her diamond rings.

The other time we went to the beach
was in Australia.
We stayed out all afternoon,
throwing and throwing a stick.
A big black dog running  first after,
then in front of it,
My dad sleeping in the car parked at the roadside,
my mother and I playing together
as we  had never played before.

My mother and the ocean
have always been so far divided
with me as  the guide rope in between.
I imagine reeling them both in toward each other
and one more trip.
My mother, me, a dog or cat.
Wind to bundle up for and to walk against.
Wind to turn our ears away from.
Sand to pour out of our pockets
to form a small a volcano
with a crab’s claw at the top.

So that years from now,
when I empty one pocket, I  will find sails
from by-the-wind-sailors
and shark egg casings,
fragile black kelp berries
and polished stones.
The dreams of my mother.  The bones of me.

From the other pocket, empty,
I will pull all the reunions I never fought hard enough for–
regrets over trips to the sea we never made.
And I’ll imagine taking me to oceans.
Walks.  Treasures hidden in and hiding sand.
Someone walking with me–
someone else’s child, perhaps,
and a dog chasing sticks.

I have a wonderful photo of my mother with a cat on Dylan Thomas’s Sea Wall,
taken during our trip around Great Britain in 1985, but I cannot find it, so here
is the only one I have of her and me alone together ,taken
by my sister Betty Jo, thirty-some years before .

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