Afterward, the roiled
detritus washes up for days, shifting but always stuck in the wrack-zone’s
back and forth. No one owns
it and no one can really take it away; it has foiled
all remediation
efforts and it always will. But it does change. Small things accrue
meaning in their accumulation; sharp things do
lose edge to agitation,
and afterward,
the tide recedes across a field of silicate and calcium
and vitreous aggregate. It is the sum
total of everything we will ever break, jettison, discard.
I admit it: I still fail
at being happy enough, though I know what the litter becomes when the tide’s been at it.
When it’s washed and sunlit
the wreckage can seem like treasure. Thrust a hand in and pull it back bleeding, fist full
of sea glass and something sharp you weren’t expecting. I don’t want to sift
through all that anymore; it’s all just words, and after words
empty shells even the birds
know better than to linger over. They were liars, whoever said a long memory was a gift.
—
Amy Glynn is a poet and essayist whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry (2010, 2012, 2024). She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: A Modern Herbal (Measure Press, 2013) and Romance Language (Able Muse, 2024). She has won the Troubadour Prize, the SPUR Award of the Academy of Western Writers, and Poetry Northwest’s Carolyn Kizer Award, among other honors.
