Motel View

Donald Revell

It is conceivable in fact that waves
and lustre work in such a way, in such
a mannered disproportion, that the sea
becomes an architectual conceit
with which to play upon the measure of
a liquid interpenetration. Wave
and the measurement of it can therefore do
but little to intensify the spume
of water in the sun. Cape Ann today
is seascape, rock, and a freezing wind. The moon
is nearly full, but risen far too soon
to have its proper place in the postcard, sun-
light being quite the thing for photographs,
the elderly, and a decent view of the gulls.
(When thinking back, it is the elderly
that one remembers most, enclosed by gulls
and glaring eastward like the benches.) Wave
and lustre mannered to a fault, the cold
vacationland in April, all combine
into a law of things, an intellect
of various disproportions, which, by day
can sometimes contradict the weather, give
one's time a fiction, or, as water does,
an elemental dullness, an expanse.