The Sanatorium, Le Grau-Du-Roi

The white beds placed out, neatly, in the sun;
the delicate, antiseptic scrape of the surf
over the beach, the taut shell. I had come
(not as a patient, I thought) with enough
health to see me through. But watching,
each day, the dazzling, washed figures
round a bed like gardeners plotting
some vegetable cure for their sick as
I walked, not spotlessly, over their sand,
I saw why they came here, a place
unplagued by uncertainties. This land,
held for the sea to be by, and to face
the sun, has nowhere else to go,
no hill to clamber and squint from and
no inland jagged motions but one slow
coil of waves in clocks of sand.

Less decorously, nearby, some trippers laze,
unhealing, miserable, secure,
and oil a leathery arm or two, or gaze
blankly at that scintillating shore.
None stroll this far. My traveling eye, though, sees
that those trust the white amplitude of years
to swell recovery into a cure, while these
bodies on vacation roll each half hour, stare
and squirm to ease their burning thighs,
yet coax no bright events out of the sea,
ignoring the sick men with sun-filled eyes
who quietly, grain by grain, build ecstasy,
and in me too, stale pools of sickness, sipped
and diagnosed at last, come clean, break free —
I stand and watch my quick, dead footprints sift,
unhurried as an hourglass, to the sea.