i notice how writers use the same imagery and motifs again and again.

the author i am reading now writes about "eyes scratching darkness," in many different contexts. e.e cummings has his flowers and his moments ever-opening. billy collins dances. linda hogan has impressions and indentations. i write of things being rounded out, worn, softening. these are not conscious choices or devices--they are beyond my control or conscious understanding, something innate, like a mannerism or an accent. like the way i limp a little when i walk, run my tongue over my lips when i'm nervous, my finger over the bridge of my nose when i'm deep in thought. they are signifiers of mysteries.

so i wonder what this imagery means to us, where it comes from, where it lives inside us, if we found it accidentally in our dreams. i wonder of the day these images crystallized inside us, became the closest expression of something otherwise unnamable, something that spoke of the essence of something we needed but couldn't understand. when billy collins looked through the window and first saw the dancing of the moths, what was dancing inside of him? i wonder if there is anything deeper than that?

for myself, i think perhaps i can find the "rounding out" on the beach as a child, in the seashells and seaglass, and the motes i dug, the walls i'd carefully square against the tide that softened them again and again. and perhaps it was also in my father and mother, sitting a little ways away, their marriage crumbling. the beach was the good days. there was no fighting there.

but then, later, the beach was the walks i took with my father and step mother, when he'd scream at her and she'd sob, and i'd look for the colors in the sand, like glimpses of a world made whole, remnants of another way to live. i'd pretend i didn't understand the "goddamn whore," suddenly a foreigner, suddenly ashamed to witness this, apart from it, like the shock of rounded-out blue glass in the sand. my father filled jars with it, proudly displayed them.

i'd play a game when the sand was hard where i'd try not to break the its surface, try not to leave a single mark.

and the days were rounded out by rain and wind in summer. we'd watch from the balcony, the tornados spiralling miles out, rounding the air and water into cycles the size of children, so small and yet so scary because they were impossible to understand. they seemed to defy this flat earth, this horizontal sea. and sometimes we'd get stuck in the storms, the sheets of rain coming towards us, and we'd try to outrun them and fail-- the sand in its countless shades and shapes of beige whipping our legs like curse words spit into the wind.

we went walking every day, religiously. i lagged behind, lonely, but also not wanting to catch up. loneliness was the way life was--the color of the sea and sand. on good days, my dad taught me the names for the shells and the clouds from a little book with pictures--the whispy ones, the ones that burrowed in on themselves. the ones that hollowed out, and rounded the horizon like the sun.