Conches on Christmas

Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this

barnacled pod so pales

next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales

that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss

except that there

was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells

silently, sans the heraldry of bells,

neatly, sans an astrological affair,

and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived—

an encrusted school of twenty-four

Gabriellan trumpets at my beach house door

and barely half-alive.

Oh, you can bet

I picked them up, waded right up to my ankles in

there among ’em, hefted ’em up to my ears to hear the din

of all things oceanwise and wet,

but every of the ancient, bearded, anthracite,

salt-water-logged spirals,

every of the massive and unwieldy, magisterial

mollusks shut tight—

no din, no horns roaring reveille, no warning, no beat, no taps,

no coral corpus,

no porpoise purpose

except it was a secret purpose kept strictly under wraps.

A fine Christmas gift indeed, this

obscure migration,

this half-dead conch confederation

which would have smelled yon tannenbaum like fish—

a fine set of unwrappable presents

and no receipt by which I could redeem them.

I lifted one up by its stem

and thought of how, by increments,

all twenty-four

must have lugged those preassembled bodies here

sans Santa, sleigh, and eight little reindeer,

to my drasty stretch of shore.

And, no other explanation being offered for the situation,

I thought that I might understand

how one could argue that the impulse driving them to land

was a sort of evolutionary one—

misguided, yes, redundant, a million years too late,

a needless, maybe rogue and almost campy

demonstration of how history,

even in the world of the invertebrate,

repeats itself—breaker

crashing down on breaker in the Gulf, Gulf War

coming after Gulf War.

O Maker,

there is so much slug inside these shells,

here, at the end of December,

at the edge of a world I couldn’t blame if you did not remember.

Miracles sell well,

but Lord, it can be numbing

to a people who cannot

tell between a second nature and a second thought,

a second chance, or a second coming.