I’m staring down the ghost crab’s periscope.

The day is much stemmed, the day’s a shadow puppet.
Sea oats, sea oats & Spanish bayonet.
Between the beneaths
— you know how it is —

slender, thick stemmed splendor.

This. This is a beach at sunup
on a tide so low

it must be running from something —
I’m going to friend it, track its skidmarks & squiggles —

cave paintings, sedimentologies —
and see what the plover
posts on its wall.

White spaces, constellations of crumble,
crumble & surge,
margin & trundle. I never had a mind

for righteousness, never had a mind at all,
just a bunch of waves

and one or two ways
to duck under, ride them.

Trough to peak, the usual correspondences —
but more Dramamine, more peach
unbluing. Crow over dunes,

the dunes a thicket of thickets.
The sun’s up
to its usual banditry — nice,
a bit sweaty. There go three pelicans.

And there: two shrimp boats way out there.
A little windswell, piddly mush —

sweet & lazy song. So it goes. The myrtle,
the bay leaves.
Deer paths in dunes.

The ocean felting its pearly wool.

Barrier islands bury our eyes.

It’s a long way to supportive,
to suppertime.
A blessed, balmy way.

The waves, larger or smaller,
they say hush, they sound like rest.