Evolution
      Lambertsbaii, South Africa, 1992


A girl scoops up a barnacle still sealed, sleek as a liver, glossy-black.
Her fingers trace its ear-like curve, wrench it open.

Down the beach, shell-pink children wade through tidepools, lift
      long flamingo legs
over kinked ropes of seaplants shining

with tide-froth, over unhinged barnacles, deep
bruises on the sand. She drops the shell-winged body

foaming to the beach benchmarked by the tide's endless
starting over, erasing

the margin of regret. Yesterday I saw nothing

but fog, the last
wintery breath of every creature on earth or all the dead

risen, clouding the blue mirror held
over the pale lip of sand. Or the barrier

of my own breath, that pearl wall. She drifts
until the cloud of her body

dissolves into sand. Until we are not
this skin, not flesh tangled with fishing-line nerves, feathery

weeds of blood, but petrified foam drifting the tongue of rock
alive with birds, pale cape gannets, dark cormorants,

penguins taking the first wobbling human steps to shore.


-- Sandra Meek