The beach teems with life.
I’m losing the names of the days. Losing the sense of time passing.
So the other day I filled my pocket full of shells, and they all came alive, every one. It looks as though the shells are discarded by their lifeforms, washed up and beached. But each shell has a hidden little inhabitant, a chitinous lobster person.
This afternoon at the beach: all the rich in-between shades of sepia, the occasional green bloom of a type of algae or mineral in a rock, or the lavender or purple-tipped anemone. Maybe coral and orange. Mottled and many-layered and refracted, cast up and clarified by the water, harsh under hardy sky.
First I notice the shells on the beach, which are all inhabited. The beach is some type of coral rock, maybe, and lots of plastic trash. Usually the plastic is any color of bottle cap. My mind, trying to make order, recognizes little anguished faces in the clusters of rock holes. Every group of three is ordered into a face by my mind. The dark holes are primitive and innocent, like pictures I’ve seen of the dark eyes of fluffy baby seals.
I find a flip-flop piece, hardened by salt and weather and wet. And other trash which is now weathered to the extent that it seems naturalized – made part of nature again.
On the zone of beach by the water algae grows on the rock surface, making it unexpectedly slippery. Far away and up close it looks like red brown mud. On far ends of the algae rock, seagulls mount on pedestal legs and peer into the water’s edge or sleep. They seem knowing, territorial and authoritative citizens. (I intuit an authority to nature or what I perceive to be nature.)
Docks of rock, barrel, wood protrude over the sky-colored sepia-stippled water. I relax on a dock, adjust my slippery glasses, and look straight down into the sepia sea scene below.
Upon first look under the water I see more rock and hermit crab shells and algae. Then I notice the anemones. They blend into the sepia surroundings at their base and end in purple tipped fingers flagging in water flutter. Then a big fish – evidenced by movement – arrow quick. As though water is something thinner than air through which organisms can more quickly propel themselves. Or maybe the water offers something to push against. Maybe were the fluid of air more substantial, I could propel myself through it more quickly, cut through.
And then after a few moments of watching the sepia sea, my eye focusses into the upper stratosphere of water – a magic-eye picture. A pane of water exists in this focussed perception through which juvenile fish minnow. They pulse in vectors which start, hover, change direction, and start again. And another pane down in the lower shallows are other juvenile fish. And through it all translucent mud-colored shrimps weave their little fan tails.
Grasses lie further out beyond the water past the dock. The tape of their leaves is also synchronous with the current, like the anemone tentacles. My vision of life by the sea grasses is obscured by the thickening skin of light, the opaque reflection of blue sky. The under water fades into surface, bluer as I move my sight skyward.
And back on the beach I tender along with my magic-eye perception. Little crabs peer out of life-laden recesses under piles of rocks. When I walk up to get a closer look, my shadow covers the hole and the crab notices the change in light or perhaps feels the impact of my weight griding rock into chalk and he moves sideways behind a rock, bashful or shrewd.
And my serious man with the salt-and-pepper beard and proletariet hat, my love, waits on a bench in the grass for me with my bag. He’s exhausted and resigned. He has a present for me, I’m sure of it. And when I sit down beside him, my love says, Here, I have something for you. And holds a hollow crab claw in between his thumb and ruddy index finger.
Lady K