Walking along a forgotten strip of beach
On Nantucket Isle,
I am thinking: When civilization ends,
It will look like this.
My bare feet pad over
Rocks smoothed by the surging tide, and
Old empty horseshoe-crab shells, wide brown-rimmed
Carapaces lie in sand-flanked
Clusters where the gulls dropped them.
Knotty driftwood and streamers of
Dry seaweed line the banks, blown by a salty wind,
And the brush quails on its sandy purchase.
I notice chipped, emptied conches and
Jagged seashell fragments,
Thousands of them, innumerable,
As if they had no worth;
But some find value in these wave-sundered fragments.
A niece of mine, nine years old, blond hair streaming,
Runs ahead to seek out further treasures;
She hoards the emerald-green conches
And spoked clamshells like secrets.
The flaming orange sun is descending and
Shimmering on her sea-sprayed
Skin and she is beautiful—
Her deep butternut tan and her eyes,
Empty of all the hurtful things
Which will soon befall her.
I notice, as she runs where the waves lap
Her feet,
A fine tan-line above
The slender toes, declining like rods of glass to their round imprints.
I am lost in it like a sailor who wakes
To find he has washed from anchor to sea in the night.
The miscellany of another world scatters
The beach;
Distributed with the crab shells and the conches,
The briny seaweed and the ruffled sand:
Here a boat-shoe has washed up,
Green and white on one side with the
Algae grown from its voyage,
There a cork stamped with Italian appellations;
Here a toothbrush, a rubber bin cap,
There a plastic jug of liquid
Knocked overboard by some wan seaman.
The last has lain here for years and will remain for years still, —
Perhaps fifty, perhaps one hundred—
Until the sandblown bottle splits and belches
Its fierce blue liquid across the surface.
My eye detects an aesthetic difference
Between, on one hand, these artificial remnants
And on the other, the leftover spoils of seabirds,
But I sense at once that something
Greater is at work here.
The little blond girl holds up her latest finding,
A shell, purplish, filled with a
Squirming mass of maggots.
I flinch and she shouts, “It’s ugly,”
And overhead a gull sounds its
Loud broken laugh at us,
A warning to approach no further the mother’s scaurie
Waddling ahead, looking almost broken-legged.
We are foreigners here, it seems,
And the rules which once applied are
No longer rules,
They are memories of rules, or else,
Mere forgotten fragments,
With no more meaning,
Like the empty shoe on the beach.
I follow my niece and wish I
Didn’t have to bring her back so soon—
Her beautiful feet, so small and
Imperfect—
To a world full of things which
Do not fade,
But slowly become ugly.
It seems that certainly she
Will die
With me
Soon like
Everything else,
And the waves will resume their insistent pounding.
This is fine and I am not startled by it;
The tracks her feet leave are pretty once and then gone and no worse for it.
But they leave me now in the wind,
And among the blowing weeds I stop walking,
Terrified,
My eyes reeling among unchartered worlds,
Wondering if ours is the same since we departed.