Andrena Zawinski

Weather Report from Seaside Hotel

Now through night’s caressing grip
Earth and all her oceans slip…
–Auden, “Nocturne”

I’m fading tonight, even more quickly than this sky
going dark as cinder, while a roughneck boy with his dog
is fired up on the beach, leapfrogging driftwood and rocks.

I wonder whether they will later lay themselves down
on a gritty bed of sand, flattening their history of footprints,

whether they will curl into each other and rest, whether
their mutual dreams will revisit the raucous of day
detailing the simplicity of feet, of paws kicking up sand.
Just outside the window, the drunken lovers return,
are at it again, stumbling in on too much wine and new raw.

And the waves are roaring in across the way, predictable
how no one will sleep deeply through this night’s grip
with the boom and bang of the ocean on earth at high tide.
Someday I will return to to this blustery place, settle in,
protected from the whip of wind, when I may dream to be

a child running carefree along the beach with a dog,
mastering the simple formula of wild, but for now
I make watch of this spread of sky for signs of storm,

veiled behind a thin curtain of fog shadows dancing
and the uncertainty of what cannot be forecast.

Andrena Zawinski is Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com.  She lives and teaches writing in Oakland, CA but hails from Pittsburgh, PA where she was born and raised.  Her full collection is Traveling in Reflected Light from Pig Iron Press. Her Greatest Hits 1991-2001 chapbook is from Pudding House. Her work appears widely online and in print.