Late Summer, Beach

You are sixteen. Your face is kissed
with youth like an aunt’s smothered
lipstick. Your boyfriend is his usual
pile of knees and twig fingers, collapsing
bonfire himself, and you can’t help but look
over to the boardwalk, where Billy Taylor
is leaning against a post, and the surfer dip
of his hair swirls with so much danger
that whenever you see it, your breath leaves
your mouth, curls in mid-air, freeze-frames
like a 20-foot wave. Your boyfriend, meantime,
is whispering into your ear. His words about going all
the way are emptying out of his mouth until

they sound like a conch shell, hollow and probably
what the ocean sounds like when you drop
straight down. But there are no stomach-flipping
motions, and you can only look again at the boardwalk,
Billy Taylor flipping a cigarette into the sand,

a sparkshower universe you would become
a moon in if only he’d ask. Your boyfriend
tries again, says something about how it’s now
or never, the last night of summer, and the full
moon above you is like a single headlight zooming
towards you, like the future, like the rest of your life.

And you’re thinking never. That’s the answer
you’d give your boyfriend, if just at that moment
you didn’t see Billy Taylor, still up on that boardwalk,
not alone, anymore, kissing Janie Weaver. That’s when
your boyfriend sighs, c’mon let’s go, as if he closing
up summer the way you’d close up an ice cream shop,
and you take one more look around, at the moon
at the ocean, at Billy Taylor and you circle your
boyfriend’s waist, ease him down to the sand, let him
wash up over you, like high tide, sweeping up seaweed,
and small pebbles, the settle of near-love and clammy
hands loosening your bikini straps, the moon above you
pulling the foam up to your blanket and shrugging as if
that pulling is the only choice it has.