El Niño scooped the sand 
clearing every scrap of driftwood, 
every construction playful of a summer’s dayful 
the slapped-together forts, dinosaurs, castles
now launched to Mexico, to Tahiti, who knows?
replaced by fresh fragments of forest 
twisted logs, battered beams
shed by Oregon, by Vancouver Island and Alaska
bobbed by current
to this windswept cove.

Beneath swirls of sunset
as Van Gogh might render
among scattered scallops, kelp, 
sandpipers by the hundred, 
one joyful dog
dances the landscape
expressing with his grin
this vast chaos
of delight.