SUNDAY POETRY: "BEACH GLASS"

BEACH GLASS

by Amy Clampitt

While you walk the water’s edge,   

turning over concepts

I can’t envision, the honking buoy   

serves notice that at any time   

the wind may change

the reef-bell clatters

its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra   

to any note but warning. The ocean,   

cumbered by no business more urgent   

than keeping open old accounts   

that never balanced,

goes on shuffling its millenniums   

of quartz, granite, and basalt.

                                              It behaves

toward the permutations of novelty   

driftwood and shipwreck, last night’s   

beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up   

residue of plastic—with random   

impartiality, playing catch or tag   

or touch-last like a terrier,

turning the same thing over and over,   

over and over. For the ocean, nothing   

is beneath consideration.

                                       The houses

of so many mussels and periwinkles   

have been abandoned here, it’s hopeless   

to know which to salvage. Instead   

I keep a lookout for beach glass   

amber of Budweiser, chryoprase   

of Almadén and Gallo, lapis   

by way of (no getting around it,   

I’m afraid) Phillips’

Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare   

translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst   

of no known origin.

                              The process

goes on forever: they came from sand,   

they go back to gravel,

along with the treasuries

of Murano, the buttressed

astonishments of Chartres,

which even now are readying

for being turned over and over as gravely   

and gradually as an intellect   

engaged in the hazardous   

redefinition of structures   

no one has yet looked at.

(Photo via.)