Before recorded time
You don’t have a name for what you are in until you’re leaving it. Sometimes, to move, you have to try to give it words even when the blasts keep interrupting, even when the words you have fail to satisfy the genre of official record.
To leave themselves
The shore in late afternoon in winter sang the shells of a season of arriving tides, drumming the fragments of entire homes these creatures left behind. We walked through them in February when it was cold and you stopped on your knees before them, collecting. The awe on your face with each find. A week later the machines arrived to dredge sand over it all, to smooth the surface for the summer season––to make it, as one spokesperson said, nice for our visitors.
