Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

The Pier: Santa Monica 
Nathan McClain

September 25, 2010

Wind whipped our faces,
Wound the scarf about your neck,
Snapped the GLOW banners
Tethered from one pole to another

Along the pier, where fishing poles were lined up
Unmanned, as the men
Cut fish, listened for the soft click
Of bait taken, the line tugged.

At one art installation, a boy cast the shadow
Of a rabbit over a moon-shaped screen
With his hand. And along the beach,
Someone set glow sticks in the sand

That mimicked the tide's coming ashore
And returning to sea. Somewhere
A liquor store hummed OPEN, hummed
WELCOME, hummed

COME AGAIN. An empty church's
Spire pierced the thick evening sky,
Hymnals at rest in the sanded backs of pews.
Once a pastor called me sheep

Led astray by a wolf in sheep's wool—
But we were fully clothed when we waded
Out and stood waist-deep
In sea-water, as though we awaited a letter

Stuffed inside a bottle, or a ship
In a bottle, washed-up like news of some wreck-
age—maybe a man who bobbed in off the coast
Of nowhere, clasped to the last rib of a sailboat

Pried apart by a storm. The deck, his crew,
Everything—all cast to the wind,
And he motions to movement we couldn't
See behind the fog. We saw

Paramedics wheel a woman away
On a gurney to which her forehead, hips, thighs were
Strapped. A sign perhaps. Of what? What
Did it mean if they pricked her with needles

And her toes failed to flinch? She was
Whisked away, out there in the Pacific,
Where all I wanted was to remain still
With you, and let seaweed twine

About our ankles, and let the ocean
Snatch sand from beneath our heels.
Sometimes I feel the ocean still
Snatching sand from beneath my heel.