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At dinner, a retired woman says
"I worked there eight years." She says,
"One year at the company talent show
I told them, please don't announce me.
I don't want to sing if I'm nervous.
But I did sing and they said,
'There, that's our Delores.'"
After dinner, my wife and I leave
and go to the lounge to have tea.
The lemon in her cup sinks
under the weight of sugar,
but as the sugar dissolves,
the yellow slice resurfaces,
like a little sun.
Ashore we find
a hermit crab
the size of an earwig
inside a shell shaped
like the point on
a sharpened pencil.
Farther down the beach
the kiosk at the snorkeling place
is painted blue, pink, yellow, green and purple,
with a few spilled drops of paint
that had dried on the unpainted deck,
the walls behind not painted at all.
Back in our cabin
her bare features relaxed, completely relaxed,
there is still this one line on her forehead
and wrinkles at the corners of her mouth.
The next morning
when I cut my fingernails
a small pain persists in each nail
for a few minutes afterward.
When we return to port
we go buy sea shells at the shell shop,
take them to the ocean and toss them in.
Somewhere on a far off pacific shore
there is a cold beach with gray sand
where, at the tideline, black stones dry
briefly to a pale robin's egg blue.
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