Author: johnbrandall

John Randall is a writer living in Missouri. His interests include camping, running, walking, cutting and burning wood, messing around with magnets, foraging, and listening to podcasts, many of them about baseball.

Hydrant

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A fire hydrant drowns in the sand.
It prays for the waves to reach its feet,
to lubricate its spigot with the shining randomness
of which only ocean is capable—
toy rubber dinosaurs, light bulbs, mismatched shoes,
mismatched socks, chairs missing a leg, saran wrap.
It gave up years ago looking for the perfect shell,
its pipes thick with grit, its undelivered postcard beauty
in no way self-consoling. O, hydrant, wait, wait—
the clouds grow blue with chaos,
the pelicans flee in threes;
your time is coming.

The Surfers

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Their arms swing like windmills,
friction free, disproving grade school
texts which denounce any theory of
perpetual motion.  The surfers cling
to their boards like scholars their books. 
If waves were words, surfers would read
the dictionary from cover to back    and,
upon arriving at Zurich, would stare
at the azimuth horizon, yet dissatisfied,
pressing the ocean for one more walled
utterance—a salted syllable, a wet grunt,
anything working its way back to shore.

Humilis

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The cumulus clouds hover steady
and low in the evening sky.
They are blue or white. Their choice.
They don’t need to give a reason.
Blue because they want to;
white because they feel like it.
When they’re ready to
roll their own die, they shake
out to sea, join other clouds,
frustrate the surf with rain, and
contemplate the breeze
in another life, as sand.