Accreted darkness, this whelk’s gate of glossed
sea-breath, in its twistings a life
that slides away from rhetoric and spongy
closure, stranded at the swash line
of desiccated marsh grass, dry cores
clotted with grains that have glittered
down the years from wind-worn mountain
Appalachia for miles and miles, while
the copper-heavy minds of horseshoe crabs
drain into night. Something caused this creature
to turn away, to extrude a different winding—
left-curved, left-sounding. Now it has died.
In moonlight, ghost crabs amble out of
burrows, sideways clacking over elegant disks,
over jingle shells, over moon-snail-drilled
housing once a flow of chalky sea with no
rational means.

Dextral