1 minute read
Drift Line EmmaAylor
from ISSUE 47
Lately, I only want partial pieces.
1. Worm-bored ribs from a bittersweet. 2. The navel twist, alone, of a moon snail.
3. Dramatic ruffle, three thrills, from a huge gray oyster. Dulled silver underneath. It isn’t conscious, decisions in beachcombing being usually based in entire interior affinities for shape, color, rarity, or strangeness, meaning I make them and seldom define a method, but nevertheless I end my walk—the prior half-hour misted, whole, and inaccessible to me, as good walks in such flow should be—and open my hand, and not a single item is sound.
4. Stained-glass sliver of a fulgur whelk’s fleshlike inner pink. 5. Two riddled triangles in strips of ocher on white. The parts make me think first of O’Keeffe (not the shell paintings, but her bones): the pelvis-tousles and sockets laden by sky that seem in some lights—by crop and density—abstract, but most often strike me as extravagantly natural.
This is the way we find things.
6. Tip of a pen shell, opaque but iridescent. Maybe this is why I like the pieces now, even as it marks me an entirely different person than the child I was, on the same stretch of Atlantic beach, who cared exclusively for intact butterfly shells (my term for coquina) and undamaged scallops, razor clams, baby’s ears, and teeth; distinct, too, from the woman I’ve seen this week: summer neighbor with yellow sifter garish against her sensible straw hat and black suit, who stands ankle-deep in the water to reach the shingle and bends, inspects, selects, bends again for a perfect shell that hasn’t yet been pushed to visible sand. Now look what I’ve got— so many resemble potsherds, curves broken from vessels, sewn or woven covers, and handwriting
(7. Tunnels and punctures sorted like cuneiform on one saltwhite square) that it appears impossible I’m the first person to touch.
8. Slide of another pen. Thin as moth.
See, right through it, water polished, working like nothing. I’m mistaken. Like itself.
