Unlike the sea, she turns
slowly on shoulder and hip, the round
and tide of her belly rising
and setting with a star's grace, a small
thing asleep on the beach, down

from the trees and sea grass, through
the hot windblown sand. Beyond
her camp, the tip
of the tide's tongue, with its
rudely burgled clams, and a huff

of feathers around the gristled
bones' nest. In the swash
a seagull grapewalks, stirring up lunch.
The sea makes
the sound she sleeps to, the intimate

indiscriminate roar against which
birds call from the trees, the krik and scratch
of a mimic jay, the sweet
clear baroquerie of a fox sparrow.
The rising sea hurls itself

indifferently, scouring what it chiselled,
receding, with its hundred hands.
Sand does not surround her
any more than
the sea, though she is jar-round

and full. Even
her book is lost in it, a sand
dollar, invested as the tide
recedes, in drying
sand. The sea's cry is like footsteps

in the bleached grass, driftwood, sea-
rounded stone, that the child hears, turning
in water toward air
like orca or porpoise not quite breaching
the tessellate mirror of the sea.