Beach Events

Poem read in background adapted from an automatic writing piece by George Semsel

I will have only just seen the dead crab, drab against the sand, belly up in the water, leading me to think about choirs a long time past in white wooden churches deep in the Island, but never far from the red water. I will look in the sand for artifacts which tell me something important about this place among the mussel clusters and dead crabs belly up in the red water, waving to me from the slow moving sea, the red sea tinted by the sun, or did the sand turn red first and colour the water, and reflect itself in the sun at that peculiar moment, wandering alone along the beach where there will be perhaps a final snail moving in the shallows. I will walk for a long time before I come upon the mussel clusters, knowing they will lead t o a good soup by an open fire, later in the evening air, further down the beach-the endless beach, red with red water moving slowly over snails digging paths seldom seen or thought about. I^- will sit and light my pipe beside the starfish, thinking about the coming sunset, wondering about its colour, and if it will be the same as last night. Some time ago I had come across a bottle in the sand, thinking it no longer a human thing, but something created there in the red sand, perhaps by the water, something left there to ponder when I light my pipe and feel the embers of last year's smoke. I will move through the cave, savoring the discoveries on the other side, through the opening where the sand will ripple red against the sunset, against the slow water, the strangeness of the place, the loss of time mixed with the red of memory, of times spent long ago beside fires on other beaches, in other places where there were mussel clusters and starfish found in red water. Despite that, I will become cold and think of building a fire further down the beach, down where the water moves more slowly, with the deliberation of a snail, of humming to myself as I move through the cave, to the red beach, to the place where once I left a sandpail. I will find some older footprints, perhaps my own from another decade, to be left for another time, and the sandpail I, or someone else, will leave an even longer time ago.