Carol Dorf

MEDITATION ON ERROR

Wet hair, identify: bath, storm.
Error retrieved from streams over sand
moist cloud, cliffs. What did we look
like? Why do we want that observer?
What childhood exists without set pieces?

Mine Boardwalk, warm water,
hurricanes, and the riots.
I wanted the cold pacific, or at least
that's what I thought at 20. At 35,
it was baby, baby, baby.

At the end of the 50
years day, I want to walk without stumbling
kneel down into a tidepool and watch starfish
creeping over mussels.
There are questions I would

ask after I was done swimming, and maybe
I would answer questions.
Kneel in the sand, try downward
facing dog, watch sanderlings,
almost lose my balance.

Carol Dorf's poems have appeared in In Posse Review, Moira, A Cappella Zoo, Naugatuck River Review, Feminist Studies, Fringe, The Midway, Poemeleon, Runes, and 13th Moon. They have been anthologized in Not a Muse, Boomer Girls, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of Talking Writing, and her reviews appear in New Pages.