Glory-of-the-Atlantic

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.