Marinaria

                        1/

I hold these pieces of beachglass
the color of sky. Their contours, ridged
and rounded, wear the sorrows of the deep.
Clouds of pulled-apart cotton drift overhead.
Shadows fall where gulls’ wings catch 
the sun. There is an element of surprise 
in everything created, just as there is 
solitude in music. I am happy as I hold 
this beachglass. Happy, as when reaching 
the chord that resolves a minor fugue. Happy 
to find the same blue in stones and wings.


                        2/

At school, I knew a girl from Cadiz
who kept bits of seashells in a bell jar. 
Her eyes were green as the open sea. 
The jar stood on a bookshelf
near her bedroom window. Always,
by summer’s end, she added a layer 
to her mollusk-mosaic of pale conch, 
cockle, purple urchin, coral. I’ve kept
the sand dollar she pressed into 
my hand the day we met.


                        3/

Late in the day the boy chases gulls,
jumps waves. His brother is content 
with sitting, shifting weights of sand. 
The sea calls each one differently. 
On hearing a two-part invention, 
one follows the spiraling counterpoint,
another seeks the absolute of theme. 
Now the tide is low. Ankle-deep 
I wade in swirls of seagrass, kelp and laver. 
The same sun warms us. The same waves—
feeding, uprooting us for centuries.