Conches on Christmas

Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this barnacled pod so pales next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss except that there was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells silently, sans the heraldry of bells, neatly, sans an astrological affair, and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived— an encrusted school of twenty-four Gabriellan trumpets at my beach house door and barely half-alive. Oh, you can bet I picked them up, waded right up to my ankles in there among ’em, hefted ’em up to my ears to hear the din of all things oceanwise and wet, but every of the ancient, bearded, anthracite, salt-water-logged spirals, every of the massive and unwieldy, magisterial mollusks shut tight— no din, no horns roaring reveille, no warning, no beat, no taps, no coral corpus, no porpoise purpose except it was a secret purpose kept strictly under wraps. A fine Christmas gift indeed, this obscure migration, this half-dead conch confederation which would have smelled yon tannenbaum like fish— a fine set of unwrappable presents and no receipt by which I could redeem them. I lifted one up by its stem and thought of how, by increments, all twenty-four must have lugged those preassembled bodies here sans Santa, sleigh, and eight little reindeer, to my drasty stretch of shore. And, no other explanation being offered for the situation, I thought that I might understand how one could argue that the impulse driving them to land was a sort of evolutionary one— misguided, yes, redundant, a million years too late, a needless, maybe rogue and almost campy demonstration of how history, even in the world of the invertebrate, repeats itself—breaker crashing down on breaker in the Gulf, Gulf War coming after Gulf War. O Maker, there is so much slug inside these shells, here, at the end of December, at the edge of a world I couldn’t blame if you did not remember. Miracles sell well, but Lord, it can be numbing to a people who cannot tell between a second nature and a second thought, a second chance, or a second coming.