Emptying Out. Filling Up.

They are both well-equipped and well-dressed.
There are tents and rich oriental rugs,
and just to the side, more food, complete with China.

You spend time at the painting. No one else does.
It is not famous, and not compelling,
a snapshot in a time before snapshots

You wonder, as you stand in silence, what they felt.
Was it a lark? An adventure? Did they feel free?
Are those their casual clothes?

Did they choose to bring their culture with them?
or was it just habit. Perhaps they never thought of
stripping down. Perhaps that would have been scandalous

and they were not scandalous people.
You can tell that. All prim and proper
with all the right accouterments.

What would they think of your own forays to the sea,
Rough jeans and a shirt. Barefooted.
Carrying nothing but a camera.

and a mind unencumbered with a need
to be anything to anyone. Just me
and the sea and it’s God.

Certainly, no one will paint a painting of you,
not even one that hangs in a minor museum.
There is nothing to wonder about,

just a man on the sand.
Emptying out.
Filling up.

About this poem

Sometimes, when I am not inspired by my life at the time, I go through photographs, find one that jumps out at me, and write to it. This is one of those poems.

I go to the ocean a time or two each year, in the off-season, to empty out life, and refill with the vastness of God.

The painting is The Beach at Deauville, 1885, by Eugene Bolden, hanging at the Virginia Museum in Richmond, Va.

Tom