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Simile
This heart I found at low tide this morning, accurate to a fault, hand-sized, heart-shaped, with the thick weight of a heart, a perfect piece of limestone cut by hand by the sea who knows how long, brought up from the bottom again and again, split like our own hearts, nicked from the top half down, as if in another life it had been real, stone atrium, stone sorrow, stone ventricles, stone arteries and veins. And these glittering halves of oyster shells I picked this afternoon, like the stones worn into shape, swirled, half-eaten-out, still oiled and pearly-wet, with edges sharp enough to clean a fish. Imagine that the oysters have survived, like eyes of the otherworldly or symbols of some sexual potency, look-alikes for testicles or a woman's soft insides, as we drink them down by swallowing them whole... In the doctrine of signatures things become themselves as something else, as we are who we are word of mouth. Then I found a bird, a kind of gull, eaten by the fish and other birds, one missing wing, one eye, the rest of it so rendered past resemblance you throw it back, into the void, the chaos it came from, yet the moment it goes under it's a memory, a metaphor, we say, for what we can't quite name, tip of the tongue, whistle in the bone, death in its variety, its part-by-piece detail. Like the skull washed up one lost-and-found new year, fallen from the ocean sky, dead off the moon, something to conjure with, now set on the desk on the bony back of its head, neither human nor animal but brilliant white brain-coral, pitted, scalloped, furrowed at the brow, its stone, teardrop-shaped face a mask for mourning. Unlike the shapely clouds, changeable, emotional, a skein of moving mare's- tails, a skimmer's broken wing, cumulonimbus palaces where once-and-future beings act out their human longing. I went down to the sea, the source of life, it was filled to overflowing. The blue horizon line, however many miles, parted nothing more than air from bluer water, though it was poetry to say what it looked like.