Beach Concession Stand on Long Island Sound

by Nicholas Samaras
[appeared in the New York Times, 21 June 1994, A17]
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All sluggish spring, I watched the trucks import tawny sand from somewhere
else, bulldozing Ransom Beach and raking the season smooth. Day by day,
this took exactly forever. Waiting for the light to lengthen, I rearranged

thitry-three flavors of summer, read a single Chekhov novel, memorizing
the choppy names, my tongue thick with Cyrillic, closed my eyes
to the widening waterfront and envisioned a great bird's wings shaping

the white air. Then, on still-gray, early afternoons, stray bodies, brave
or stupid, began to skirt the slack water. The sky grew hazy and the smell
of brine built in the air until finally I woke to a warm mesh of sunlight.

Everything that matters is surf. As a child, I was evacuated from Venice
during the floods in the gilded summer of 1966, and as that child I loved
the fierce frenzy of water until police pulled us away under noon darkness.

Now, I depend on water's calm attraction for livelihood on this strip
of erosion and ocean. Striped awning uncurled, I place a lightning whelk
shell in the showcase as billows of bodies parade past and kites quilt the sky,

their wooden ribs straining against the wind. The open window-stall
looks across to Greenwhich, Connecticut, where the gold
on the buildings' windows ascends, the light runs slippery off them.

Days expend in a swelter of profit, the thrum of the refrigeration unit
in a cold sweat. Soon, I begin to recognize the familiars,
note how they daily nestle on their one, same spot of sane.

I furrow hills of ice cream and keep a nervous eye on the skyline,
the particular swells and shapes of cloud-breath, holding to the ransom
of weather. Hearing the gurgles of foreign languages, young, timbered

voices screaming and blending with seagull-caw, I watched the white skins
dive into the breach, their bodies a cataract in the Sound's cornea,
splintering the strange, amber glimmers that seem to well from deep water.

Black-tipped terns smudge the sky till, gradually, the season ebbs of light.
My mark is how the boardwalk thins of bodies, how deeply light
has carved their suits on their skins. The sun pivots in retrograde

and I am left to count the shimmery coins, think of buying
a new freezer, a fresh sign. On the quieting land spit, I walk
the stretch of my rented domain, retreat to a highland view home,

waiting out the chill and thaw for the unencumbered,
frilly waves, the many flavors of summer,
the generations of water.