It begins by tearing down
sheets of gray diaphanous sleep

by attending to a small bright
morning voice
to a body climbing
and twining
like a restless green monkey
made of vines
over me, clutching

then listening for the message
I know lies coiled in some
unimaginable electronic
spool in my phone

“Let’s go to the beach,
remember
you said
we would.”

Then it’s
time to pile and
build indeed

sandwiches, fruits
chips,
cookies, boxes of juice, stacked,
layered in square
thermal bags,
cold blue blocks set ‘round
to guard them

buckets
and
primary colored
implements
to sift and delve
and build again, crenellations, battlements
by the sea
creams and unguents
hats
towels
sunglasses
swaddling garments to
block the sun’s bite
a sheet on which
to stretch
supine
a chair to feel superior to seagulls
in,
these pyramid in the car trunk.
(Not so tight as Pharaoh’s construction—
but, like Pharaoh’s army,
we claim our space and construct our camp.)

Building,
the sun builds its way
in the arc
that makes up architecture
the blue sky
builds a depth
that
hurts the center of me
with its rare beauty,
a false sense of stasis fills us as we sit triumphant
at the very apex of our construction.

Then the waves build
and mount an offensive
and put us on
the run,
and all we have built
melts
into
the fragmentary, sandy, salty delicious rush of our retreat.