I was supposed to meet a friend in Newport one summer day. I got there early, drove toward Castle Hill, parked on the side of the road, grabbed a beach chair from the trunk, perched on a rock, wrote:

By the seaside sits a stone
revealing layer upon layer of
permanence
its face jutting upward defiantly at
the wave that has washed and broken and slapped
smashed and roared against its
permanence
the water of the wave reabsorbed by the sea
only to curl into another wave against another rock in another place
the older waves retire to bays to sounds to smaller seas where they lap at the shores
as three year olds
tiptoe away, shrieking in fake fear
Some waves their mark make in the stone by the sea;
the puddle and they ask the stone, what happened to the layers
that once
sat on top? And then the sun for hours
sucks up the puddle and coffee cup lids and plastic wrappers
foul what was clear for only a millisecond
in the lifetime of water
And the puddle never hears the answer.

The stone, old, contemplative, everylithic
ponders how once what was smooth is
now uneven and jagged and fissured
and says those are the parts of me
I gave to You.
And all is silent as the waves murmur a
muffled gratitude and the stone sits
by the seaside contented by his response.