After Lida Cardozo Kindersley & Els Bottema
From the few human
…………..dwellings it reaches
(like the light-starved
…………..tentacle of a blind
deep-sea creature)
…………..over the shingle
beach toward a sea that,
…………..wave after wave,
reaches relentlessly
…………..back. Decades ago,
Meg now explains
…………..as we all step across it,
two women, old friends
…………..who were living through cancer,
placed the bleached shells
…………..of twenty-some thousand
whelks in a line
…………..three hundred yards long…
And now, as we crunch
…………..north up the shore
on our afternoon walk,
…………..my wife and I pocket
white whelks by the dozen—
…………..each tide leaves a crop
in its wake like a tithe—
…………..so that soon, when we come
crunching back down,
…………..we too can add,
as others have done,
…………..as others will do,
our shells to the line.
…………..(In a time-lapse,
the tentacle quivers
…………..as it frays in the elements
and is tidied by hands:
…………..now blurry, now sharper,
as if moving beneath
…………..a sheet of dark water.)
Meanwhile, beside us,
…………..the dark sea is breathing
quite calmly, some seals
…………..loll on a sand bar,
and much farther out,
…………..making for Felixstowe,
a motionless row
…………..of container ships pins
the horizon briefly
…………..in place, in time…
Beyond them, you
…………..can just make out
(if you have better eyes
…………..than our son, who squints
through his glasses in vain
…………..before borrowing Paul’s
binoculars), the ghostly
…………..turbines that body
forth from the mist
…………..to proclaim themselves
the forests of our future,
…………..then sink back again
into the unseen,
…………..there to go on
farming the wind
…………..for power. The same
wind that’s now rising,
…………..blowing our daughter’s
hair into the air
…………..like a dark aura
as she swivels her phone
…………..away from the sea
toward an old pillbox
…………..still lodged in the dike
(click) and then (click)
…………..a centuries-old
Martello Tower—
…………..traces of different
wars, the same fears.
…………..The sea, of course,
is rising too,
…………..as it did when the place
called Doggerland—ancient
…………..plains that once stretched
between Holland and here—
…………..drowned in these waters.
(In a time-lapse,
…………..the plains turn to islands
that shrink and are gone,
…………..and the waters become
the Mare Germanicum,
…………..the Frisian the West the
North Sea, and we
…………..become and are captured
here for a frame—
…………..Ravi and Mira,
Padma and me…)
…………..Look at us looking,
eyes to our lenses,
…………..taking small keepsakes,
leaving small traces;
…………..blink and you’ll miss us.