a little of what's been on my mind

(09 February 2009)

Remembering that streaming, dirty creek to ocean at filthy Sugar Beach, La playa pan de azucar, as I cross campus bridge over already slowing-to-a-trickle creek, the rushing, unstoppable water of the past days having reached the Pacific at the bottom of the hill.

I crossed that garbage-strewn creek near a group of loud and rowdy Ticos, beach campers who felt a little drunken, like everything else in that town. On the edge of madness, violence. A tourist, souvenir shop and cervecería wonderland, Pinocchio's Pleasure Island. I crossed near them cautiously, taking care on the steep sandy walls of the creek bank, picking my stepping stones with precision. (Who doesn't want to get wet at a beach? I'm telling you, not this creek. Not this playa). And there, nearby, all floppy and opulent, a colorless greyish white in the sand, lay a long dead snake. Pink and rubbery, maybe three, four feet long, twisted sickeningly. Now I'm not one to fear snakes, but seeing this bloated body made my stomach turn, limp like the penis of the man mauled by a grizzly in the photo I didn't mean to see.

I don't know why I'm writing this, really, except walking back from the library tonight, singing snatches of Radiohead softly, I noticed the water, the bridge, the quick and strong and finally fleeting rains. Only You can heal a barren land. Only turn toward us.