Navarre Beach, FL
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
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.
That Didn’t Happen, Did It?
We conjure a garden of
tendriled and well-leafed
realities. Deep is the soil
of time when we sprinkle
our plans like crystals of blue
fertilizer. But most futures die;
we can water and sun only one.
The Surfers
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.
Fish Head
Navarre Beach, FL
Humilis
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.
Navarre Henge
Navarre Beach, FL
Out to Sea
Navarre Beach, FL
Beams
Navarre Beach, FL
Rain Sequence
I
A cloud, glowing purple
with mischief
puts a hand on my shoulder
and nibbles at my ear.
Its menthol breeze
hastens me to cover.
When the rain comes
—pitter patter—
I ask only that
it leave its hailstones
at the door.
II
The storm went off.
The storm has no lights.
He’ll come back on,
by tomorrow.
The lights went off.
The lights went down.
Rain and thunder,
by tomorrow.
III
Aha, I caught you—!
—Caught me at what?
It stopped raining—
—Yes, but it’s still wet.
