Proper Adornment
Karla Linn Merrifield
At Cabot Beach
all that glitters
is not
sea glass
beauty to be had
at little cost.
Dust of blue mussels
in nacreous sheer veils
define last blue night’s
high tide line,
the silkiness
of their able bodies
long forgotten.
Polished silver driftwood—
a straight stem,
its gnarled fan of roots—
pearls morning
with no memory
of its coarse bark
brown sheath of life.
When gulf water
meets red sand, red cliff,
it curls white ruffles
in the wake
of the oystermen
putting out to satin sea.
And like rubies,
medusa sea jellies,
still moist,
and a sea skate,
its opal underbelly exposed,
have washed ashore
to glisten with fresh death.
This is the beauty
to be had
at Cabot’s Beach:
the glittering litter
not of sea glass
pocketed to take home
but the mantle, the jewels
of the dead and gone
to remember.
all that glitters
is not
sea glass
beauty to be had
at little cost.
Dust of blue mussels
in nacreous sheer veils
define last blue night’s
high tide line,
the silkiness
of their able bodies
long forgotten.
Polished silver driftwood—
a straight stem,
its gnarled fan of roots—
pearls morning
with no memory
of its coarse bark
brown sheath of life.
When gulf water
meets red sand, red cliff,
it curls white ruffles
in the wake
of the oystermen
putting out to satin sea.
And like rubies,
medusa sea jellies,
still moist,
and a sea skate,
its opal underbelly exposed,
have washed ashore
to glisten with fresh death.
This is the beauty
to be had
at Cabot’s Beach:
the glittering litter
not of sea glass
pocketed to take home
but the mantle, the jewels
of the dead and gone
to remember.
Listen to Karla read the poem here:
Working notes
“Proper Adornment” addresses what I think of as a healthy, occasional pre-occupation with death. I’ve made a modest crusade to combat the Western world’s sanitation of death. A road crew comes upon the carcass of a deer and the roadkill is promptly hauled away. The mortician gets to work making a corpse look lifelike. We’re trained to avoid looking the dead in the eye. But death is part of life and I prefer to stare at and study the dead at my feet, whether in a poem where you find the speaker on a beach on Prince Edward Island as in this poem, or through the hundreds of photographs I’ve made of tire-ravaged squirrels and raccoons on the highway, or shark-chomped salmon and wave-torn bivalves strewn on the sand. Death is a thing of beauty; death is natural.
About the author
A seven-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had some 400 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has ten books to her credit, the newest of which are Lithic Scatter and Other Poems (Mercury Heartlink) and Attaining Canopy: Amazon Poems (FootHills Publishing). Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry is Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills) received the 2009 Eiseman Award for Poetry and she recently received the Dr. Sherwin Howard Award for the best poetry published in Weber - The Contemporary West in 2012. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com), a member of the board of directors of TallGrass Writers Guild and Just Poets (Rochester, NY), and a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.