Glory-of-the-Atlantic
1
A hoard of seashells has appeared offshore this winter,
half-buried alongside smooth rocks and chunked coral,
and I’ve been enjoying myself like a teenager on spring break,
snorkeling for hours, sifting and duck-diving, perusing
the field guide to identify my finds. Noble wentletraps,
pretty little dove shells, lightning whelks of every size.
When I asked my friend Paul, who works for the county
environmental department, to explain this strange bonanza,
he said, sadly, these are not locals but stowaways
eroded from sand trucked in to “renourish” our beach
from Florida’s shell-rich western coast. Correction:
my recent behavior in no way resembles a teenager
or anyone else on spring break—I am enjoying myself
like the meditative, middle-aged shell collector I am.
What else have I discovered in the shallows?
Countless olive shells: the dimly striped dwarf olive,
the netted olive laced with sinuous brown scribbles,
the lettered olive, whose spikier calligraphy resembles
cylinder seals used by Mesopotamian kings
as stamps on trade goods to foil ancient tax evaders.
The flamingo tongue is an oddly shaped sea snail
that feeds on gorgonians and looks, lying bleached
on a beach towel, like a pair of white porcelain lips.
Triton shells, a.k.a. trumpet shells, feast on urchins
and sea cucumbers in turtle grass sand-meadows;
the Atlantic trumpet triton is our local exemplar,
and the horn blown by the demigod Triton
rising from Rome’s Trevi fountain is one such,
ergo, Triton’s Atlantic trumpet triton trumpet.
Turret shells are the horns of tiny aquatic unicorns,
jingle shells resemble chits of Lalique glass,
Atlantic distorsio suggests a new genre of dance music,
but the most splendidly named of all is
the Glory-of-the-Atlantic, which defies its grandiloquent title,
like a youthful nobleman playing at rustication,
by approximating a miniscule vermilion ice cream cone,
a whorl of gelato for some aesthetically minded shrimp.
2
You see how my brain works, reveling in detail
but moving ever inward, turning away from the world
toward the world’s reflection in language?
Seashells are not sculptures but incarnations
of metabolized calcium, small triumphs of bioengineering
that mimic the involute contours of consciousness,
arcs and abrasions and absences around
the voluptuous rebus of identity. That captive rapture
thrumming in their depths is not water but blood
surging through tympanic membranes,
not an oceanic labyrinth but time’s echo chamber.
The glory of the sea may be salt but the glory
of the mind is syntax. I hold its name on my tongue—
Glory-of-the-Atlantic—but I’ve never touched it,
never seen one, and, outside of Wikipedia, never will.
Fine. Let it glow with the green light of the unobtainable.
Let the world keep a few of its hard-won secrets.
3
Waist-deep on the sand bar, I’m thirty yards from shore,
looking back at the burgeoning social commotion
along the boardwalk and the tousled coconut palms
brushing hair from their eyes like dawn-startled lovers.
Cloud-bronzed, nearly flat, the ocean is an undulant mirror
beneath which large purple jellyfish pulse
like magma blossoms while swarms of bait fish
hang beneath mats of gulfweed in their silvery hundreds.
Even up close they are nearly invisible, translucent,
a mosaic of disembodied eyeballs suspended in the void
until they shift as one, telepathically, casting fractal
diamond-shaped reflections across the rippled seafloor.
Only as they recalibrate, and grow still, am I sure
they are real, unless—this is a dream?
Unless everything is an immersive illusion
and consciousness nothing but a time-lanterned reel
of hallucinatory stimuli, a fantasmagoria?
But—these seashells: their rapt materiality,
their weight in my hand, their thing-ness.
They may disintegrate to ruins or dissolve to grit
but surely they exist, surely they are creatures
hardwired to sunlight and biochemistry,
proof-of-concept for clockless existence, here,
amidst the medusae, sargasso, and slender mojarra,
a realm of companionable, planetary ghosts?
It’s early, low tide, the beach just coming to life:
devout ladies davening in lounge chairs,
the homeless roused from hard-worn sleeping bags,
joggers, skulkers, cabana boys unfolding hotel umbrellas,
icing down the day’s allotment of Michelob Ultra.
Tourists are wandering down from the boardwalk
to the timidly breaking surf, couples from Toronto,
jet-lagged families from France and Brazil,
dazed, sun-dazzled, amazed—one guy actually
staggers at the water’s edge, staring straight past me,
and I can see on his face what he wants to know—
am I still on the plane, am I sleeping, or is this real?
Before he can ask, I slide from the sandbar
backward into the water’s warm, saline embrace.
Of course it signifies the womb as well as the void.
Of course death absorbs the living, a mirror
made of sponge. Of course we travel between realms
far exceeding in mystery water, earth, and air.
Of course we leave behind a mark, a volt,
a wave-eaten relic. Of course nothing endures
but that which forges its armature of grief,
the soul. Of course it’s real, of course it’s a dream,
you’re adrift, you’re asleep, you’re on a plane
traversing tropospheric darkness, you’re watching
sunlight strike prisms against the windows of your eyes,
you’re underwater, it’s real, it’s a dream,
a voyage, an immersion—any day now, any century,
any minute we will arrive at our final destination.
