Poem: Black Spider Beach

 

Black Spider Beach

 

no sand, only pebbles,

unreckonable dice rolls of hungry waves;

 

and seaweed pungent along the wrack line,

mussed and disheveled:

jagged miles of flattened sea monsters,

orgies in shucked, shaggy throes.

 

so so much, much too much wind

 

it licks basalt niches

and flutes through old weirs.

it tickles purple stalks of Jonah crabs

shriveling their plump, unctuous eyes.

 

“Boot Cove Bay”

 

always an old shoe here,

and if it vanishes

another takes residence overnight.

a better name would be “Black Spider Beach”

 

for the stubbly spiders, broad as thumbnails,

which percolate up through the stones.

 

in October

every footfall radiates arachnid,

and if you approach the lone shoe,

scuttles ripple around your steps.

 

just an ordinary sneaker, the $-mart kind,

brine-dyed and beach-bitten;

but the spiders seem afraid, somehow,

as if the Ace of Spiders waits below.

 

twin Clorox bottles

nod from the intertidal zone,

white plastic foreheads

of a couple who tried.

 

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2/2/24 ... mods

5/25 ... more word changes... can't get this to cohere

5/21 ... lots of mods, though cosmetic

5/14 ... mods later in the day

https://www.mcht.org/preserve/boot-head/