Sample Prose and Poetry by Frank Finale

Below are three of the twenty-four stories and personal essays by Frank Finale appearing in "To The Shore Once More." The book is divided into six chapters—Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Christmas, and Poetry. These three personal essays appear in the "Summer" and "Winter" chapters.

Also below are three of the seventy-eight poems by Frank Finale included in the book.The "Poetry" chapter is divided into seven sections: The Jersey Shore, Nature, Autumn, Winter and Christmas, People, School, and Labor. These three poems appear in the "The Jersey Shore" and "Labor" sections.

To The Shore Once More:
Point Pleasant Beach

Always, with the salt air, an aroma of sausage, peppers and onions, and God-knows-what sauces drift up and down the boardwalk. It was one of those sea-scintillating summers, every weekend an arcade dealer's dream. I had turned twenty-one, and everything seemed right with the world—I even thought I understood Browning who believed only God could. I drank martinis, busboyed at Martell's, and listened over and over again to Sinatra singing, "It Was A Very Good Year."

Each evening after work, I would put on my best clothes and go back to the boardwalk, looking for the company of girls. Most times I would just pick up the ping-ping sounds of pinball machines and the wheels' spinning promises of dolls and teddy bears for a quarter down. The games of skill and chance lured me in, every stand ablaze in neon and crackling its shuttle of numbers.

By day the boardwalk became a different world. In early morning, joggers, bicycle riders, fast walkers, and dog walkers thrived. Some mornings people stayed for about ten minutes to sit on a bench or lean against the rusted railing and stare out at the sea as though waiting for a revelation. Before the beach opened to the vacationing throngs of bathers and sun-tanners, old men went beachcombing; their metal detectors vacuumed the tops of sand ripples like gulls skimming waves. Here and there kids searched for shells, dodged their dogs and the waves or threw stones into the ocean just to test their reach.

Once a dead whale washed up onto the beach. By the time we got there, people had carved their initials into it, put their cigarettes out against its side, and taken chunks of flesh away. One young man climbed on top of the beast and beat his chest like Tarzan. There's something about a dead giant that brings out the worst in people. Because of its smell, the whale was dragged out to sea and blown up, much to the relief of the people who lived nearby.

Other things washed onto shore by the hundreds: blowfish, pink, puffed, and prickly, looking like strange balloons left over from a novelty store; starfish, dry and brittle, which herring gulls liked to strut with in their beaks; and horseshoe crabs, strewn over the tideline and looking from a distance as though some ghostly cavalry had galloped by, leaving only their grotesque shapes.

Storms delivered most of the wreckage. Meanwhile, my own inner storms drove me to the beach—the types of storms that rack many young people on their rites of passage into adulthood: Should I marry the high school girl as my mother urged me to? What would I do when summer ended? What kind of work should I devote my life to? But whatever problems I was weathering dwindled when I brought them before what the poet Hart Crane called "this great wink of eternity." Standing on the shore at night, listening to the hollow boom and hiss of the waves, I stared at the legion of stars processioning the sky. Absorbed by the immensity of space and time, I was struck by the preciousness of life in all its varied forms and exalted in being part of that procession.

First appeared as "To The Shore Once More" in:
COAST Magazine, July 1987
Anthologized In:
Shore Stories, 1998

The Kiss

My wife and I, in the throes of the January blahs, had just finished eating supper. We were clearing the table and trying to avoid stepping into each other in our tiny kitchen apartment when she walked over to the steamed-up window. Using a dishrag, she wiped off the condensation and peered out. "Look at it snowing!" she said.

Joining her at the window, I looked out and saw a steady stream of flakes in the street light. When I opened the window, snow whirled in from the darkness. The fresh, cold smell left me giddy. I had looked before and hadn't seen a thing. Now the dark cracks of walkways were filled with white. Ghosts of snow descended on the bones of the three maple trees outside our window and shrubs were little white hillocks.

The town's sanitation department was caught off guard. One lone car, like a bewildered beetle, was feeling its way up the avenue.

We turned toward each other and caught the other's thought. It had been years since we had gone for a walk in the snow just for the sheer joy of it. "Let's do it!" we both seemed to cry at once.

We layered ourselves with clothes—long johns, flannels, sweaters—and topped everything off with hooded coats. Looking and feeling like Arctic explorers minus the dog sled, we abandoned the dirty dishes and set out from the steam-heated, oven-warmed kitchen into the night.

A vast whiteness dwarfed us. Avenues had lost their names. We walked past the Chatfields' yard, where a hapless Chevy pick-up sat on the blocks of its final resting place. The snow had pulled a sheet over its rusted body. We walked past the DeGiorgios', whose once brilliant rose garden was now abloom in white. We trudged down to the muffled roar of the ocean three blocks away.

Running across Ocean Avenue, we plunged into a thigh-high snowdrift and tumbled out, laughing so hard our tears mixed with the snow already melting on our red faces. We crunched our way up to the boardwalk, the cold air burning our lungs as we gasped for breath.

Standing near the shore's edge in the night, there were few points of reference. The only sounds were the soft shushing of the snow and the harsh hissing of the sea. There were no boundaries. Looking up into the swirling night, I grew dizzy and felt as though I might fall off the end of the earth if I didn't grab onto something solid. Gripping the iron railing of the boardwalk, I looked at my wife. Between the flakes I could only see her red hood. Although we were a couple of feet from each other, she barely heard me call out, "Let's go back."

She agreed. What began as a walk in the snow was becoming a survival mission. As we were going, she pulled me into an alcove by a boarded-down hotdog stand. There—unexpectedly—she kissed me.

The white balloons of our breath held no words, but I still remember that simple kiss. Time seemed to stop. Her breath tasted of wintergreen and her lips were moist against mine. The gloom of the alcove lit up. The jasmine scent of her perfume filled my senses and washed away the dank odor of that shelter. Our boots squeaked as we swayed back and forth. Though our faces were numb and the cold and dark engulfed us, this one sweet kiss seemed to prove our existence. Outside the alcove, the snow seethed. Abandoning ourselves to our own weather, we kissed again. I felt at peace with myself and everything around me.

But it was time to leave. The snow, deeper now, fell more heavily and quickly. No cars were out, so we had the joyful experience of galumphing down the middle of the avenue without worrying about traffic. The shells of our ears held an ocean sound, our fingers, feet, and faces tingling like a thousand stars. Wind wolves howled around us and followed us to our door, where we left them. We stayed up into the early morning hours, watched old movies on TV, and made love as the radiator hissed and knocked far into the night.

Originally appeared in:
COAST Magazine, January/February 1989
The Beachcomber, August 15, 1998
Anthologized In:
A Loving Voice II: A Caretaker's Book Of Read-Aloud Stories For The Elderly, 1994

The Boardwalk: Spring Lake

I had already been running late for the summer English class I was scheduled to teach when I spilt coffee on my last clean shirt. When I finally left the house, I was rerouted because some of the streets were being repaved. And, naturally, the alternate route was backed up with heavy morning traffic. Aside from my arriving late for class, the morning went smoothly enough but the end-of-day conference with a mother of a girl who was failing, didn't take place. She didn't show up and she hadn't bothered to call. But most disheartening that day was the news that my wife—hospitalized for ten days for blacking out, suddenly and without warning—wouldn't be coming home for another week.

At that point, I knew I needed a respite, a revitalization of my spirits. I drove to Spring Lake which, for me, had always been a serene place, a place where time slowed down a little. Driving up Ocean Avenue along the seaside, I saw the golden cupolas of the new Essex and Sussex hotels shining in the sun. Farther down, a tern passed over the statue of a gargoyle perched grotesquely on top of a three-story Victorian house: evil sea spirits, beware.

Adjacent to this was the boardwalk, a two-mile stretch of rickety boards which rose out of the thistle, golden rod, and marram grass anchoring the high dunes. I left my car and walked onto the boards where two song sparrows were chasing each other back and forth. It was still sunny and the wind off the ocean was steady and crisp. A friend of mine once said that the wind here "hollows you out." He was right. I had already begun to feel liberated from the straight lines, boxes, enclosures, and grids of buildings and streets. As I reached the railing and looked beyond the beach to the horizon, I felt a rush of light and an expanse of space. Here sea and sky blend together. I spotted a lone freighter so distant and pale it might have been a phantom.

There are no distracting arcades, amusements, or fast food places on this boardwalk. Here the sounds are elemental: the crash, hiss, and whoosh of water on a smooth beach; the wind playing with the sand and whistling in and out of the spaces of the boardwalk. And always the cries of the gulls which perch themselves on old-fashioned gas lampposts, the kind with quaint lantern tops.

I took a deep breath of salt air, let it linger in my lungs, then released it. The wind, laundered by the ocean, felt clean. I stepped onto one of the small, white pavilions which projected about ten yards out onto the beach. The boards underfoot creaked in their nails and below them, the tide rushed in and out, leaving a twisted strand of cargo: shells, driftwood, seaweed, gull feathers, cork, crab bits, and colored glass. Gazing at the foam and bubbles of the sea was dizzying, and I felt as if the whole pavilion was moving forward while the water remained stationary. I sucked in my breath and looked back at the boardwalk for reassurance.

The slam of a car door broke the mood. A boy and a girl, not more than seven and both squealing, dashed ahead of their parents onto the boardwalk and down the steps to the beach. "Be careful!" their mother shouted, but they were already jumping up and down in the sand, teasing the tide like little sandpipers.

This was one of those summer evenings when people decide to get out of the house and go somewhere. Joggers with Walkmans ran to the music's beat, keeping pace with no one but themselves. Bikers dressed in safety helmets, riding gloves, and day-glo racing shorts avoided knocking into anyone as their wheels thrummed the boards. Children in perpetual motion impatiently pranced a couple of yards ahead of their parents, then, as though playing a game, ran back again.

And then there were couples: man and wife, girl and boyfriend, friend and friend, strolling, talking. The older couples walked with arms linked or hand in hand. Teenagers, with arms around each other's waists, drifted dreamily over the boards' dark cracks.

On one of the barnacled fingers of the jetties, two lovers held hands and watched the herring gulls, their bellies white as breakers, flight smooth as the waves. I watched the lovers while their emotions took wing in a kiss and thought of my wife. Farther out, a fishing boat winked in the sun.

Finding an opening in the boardwalk, I went down to the beach. Each weathered board, according to its age, moaned a different note. In the sky, Crayola-colored fish, dragons, and hawks rippled on the updrafts, each kite invisibly threaded to a child below. Trudging through warm sand and clattering through thousands of bits and pieces of broken mussels, clams, crab shells, and knotted wracks of the necklace left by high tide, I carefully stepped onto the rocks of a jetty. Here I was blessed by the spray from whitecaps and calmed by sea winds. I felt brimmed with space and light.

Turning to leave, a frosted emerald in the strand line caught my eye. I picked it up, brushing off the grains of sand, and held it to the light. It was only a smoothed piece of bottle glass, but for me it had absorbed my mood and this time and place. Later, I would look back on this piece of green glass and smile. As the shadows of the snow fences lengthened along the curves of sand, I pocketed my gift and returned to the boardwalk, thinking, "One week, only one week."

First appeared in:
COAST Magazine, August 1989

Twilight Lake

reflects this Bay Head morning
smooth and bright as the mute swan
that floats out from
the rushes, reeds, and cattails.
Ducks circle the lake and plash
down, breaking the reflection.
They paddle to where a young
couple and their small girl throw
bits of white bread on the grass.
A little lake of gulls, doves,
mallards, and geese shapes about them,
while damselflies and darning needles
hover and dart above the fragrant
water lilies. Across the avenue,
Victorians and cedarshake cottages
hold vigil over this sanctuary. An artist
sets up his white canvas and begins
to paint what is there, what is not.

Horseshoe Crabs

I fear the crabs, feel their pincers plying my skin,
picking at the mind's flaws.
See that humped horseshoe with tapered spike that seems to float
above the grains and flounce
like a pugilist when poked. Upset it. Stare at the underside

of fright. Legs, jointed like spiders, writhe for webs
of seaweed, rocks and water,
scramble like insects brought to light from underworlds
of damp stones—claws waging
a war with air, a spike carefully wheedling

the wind. Once Paleozoic crawlers, whose armor
awkward species survived
the dinosaur and war, their shapes lie beached
and form a trail of lost
horseshoes for mud, sand and time to record.

In the shell of night, in the mythy mind, the crabs rule.
Spiny, adept with claws,
they crawl, black-brown, from a dragon-hissing sea of sleep
up to feast on
some forgotten fear; some shape too distant to remember.

Construction Worker

Driving to work on Rt. 37 West
he spots two white-tail deer bloating
on the side of the road. He carries them
in his thoughts to the work site. There he leaves
his Chevy, slaps on his yellow hard hat
and begins to shamble down the stripped slope.
The rest of the crew is already drinking
Seven-Eleven coffee. Before he reaches them
an old woman searching for her house wanders
up to him. She has been away
two weeks in Florida and did not realize
another section had been added to
the village, another piece that looks the same
as the one before it, five variations
of houses repeating their pattern;
at the main entrance, a new funeral parlor.

In the unfinished sector, a whirlwind
begins lifting leaves and dust. Out-dated newspapers
pulled into circulation
swirling from foundation to foundation, suddenly
lose energy,
drop. Workers in T-shirts snap
metal bands from a pallet of pipe.
Working in sync, they string out a few hours worth of work.
Blindingly bright, pipes reflect in sun,
forecast a hot day. The backhoe clanks
into place, begins its methodical pawing
at the earth. Like the hours ahead of them, the trench lengthens,
He, too, becomes lost in the labyrinth,
the deer having slipped his mind which now tracks
the sun's arc to the end of the day. Quitting time,
the trench filled, the pipe connected, a ghost
of dust follows each worker's car out;
at home, it reappears in their handkerchiefs.
That night he dreams of the old woman floating
away from the village; two white-tail deer
follow: past the funeral parlor, above
the yellow machines and whizzing cars
on Rt. 37, toward the horizon till they fade,
three commas in an invisible sentence.