Even disembodied,
the scattered purple claws of crabs
look like they might pinch you.
This is a rugged beach:
rock and not much sand.
A sliver of land
with chitons and limpets
and a single monarch butterfly wing.
Nearby lies the fault line
where this edge of the Pacific Plate
crunches against North America,
nature at the ready.
The ghost of the cone snail
whose shell is on my wrist—
the cone snail that had barely hatched
before it died
and the jewelry maker in Hawaii
found its beautiful baby shell—
is that tiny ghost
watching the placid
black turban snails
in their strange cold water?
When it looks out at the opaque ocean,
does it remember the warm, bright clarity
it once crawled in?
Still, this is the same sea,
this beach another seam
like the beach Matthew Arnold
wrote of while hearing pebbles roll—
as they do here—
back and forth,
back and forth.
