On Kalaloch Beach in Washington

Robert Allen

September 3, 2022

No one would know this man

has progeny, the way he stands apart

in solitude, shoulders hunched

over, contemplating a charcoal-blue

wave-rounded stone he found

upon the sand. His children stand beyond

the frame, or behind the camera. The son

peers from the dark beneath a wind-whorled evergreen

known as the Tree of Life, which grows despite

the earthless air around its roots, which fan

out with fingers gnarled and black, never reaching the heart

of watery depths. The daughter, who punched

the button on her cell phone for its view

of Daddy’s eccentricity, now scans the ground

for the enormous name someone has etched there with a wand

of driftwood. The father, never done

with being vigilant or being lost, has seen

a second stone to match the first, to his delight,

for in his mind these polished stones can

talk; they’re magical. They start

to dialogue, smooth out his mental traffic snarls while bunched

inside his pocket. His family are too

enveloped in their own pursuits to hear the sound

of two stones talking, while sea and sky abscond

in a conspiracy of steel-gray tones, run

together this midsummer’s day by increasing marine

breezes, guided by a sunset’s eye of insight.

Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and four cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, and Texas Poetry Assignment. He loves cardio-boxing workouts, hates being on time, and facilitates Gemini Ink's in-person Open Writer's Lab.