The beachgrass is bowing to its shadow:
in greeting or farewell? Who can know?
The grasses grip the dunes: Passionately?
Desperately? Indifferently? At the shoreline
some child’s pathetic Stonehenge crumbles.
There are precious few birds, a few footprints
soon erased by the melancholy grating of the waves.
I’m only calling this “beachgrass.” I’m not sure
what it is, don’t know if this over here is wild grape,
what fish these bones belonged to.
This fresher fish the storm last night surprised—
catfish? drum? walleye?—interests the gulls.
I, too, have an interest in things dead, things losing out—
coral, small frogs, little brown bats—
but I don’t any longer care to know their names.
They leave behind less than the long gone teenagers
who carved their initials into the breakwater back in ’58.
Meanwhile, that child’s sandy morning labor—
her Yamatai, Carthage, Tenochtitlan, Nineveh—
has all but vanished. What birds there are don’t sing.
Later, I learned I was right—that was beachgrass
(Ammophila breviligulata). As though knowing that helps.