Selected Poems

Hannah’s Collection
				- for C

For Hannah’s eighth birthday, you collect seashells
from Key West, Sanibel Island, St. Augustine,
and the Golden Isles of Georgia: every pristine,
magical realm within your reach. Carefully labeled, 
dated, and referenced, accompanied 
by meticulous documentation, the shells 
nestle in grottoes of numbered nut and bolt drawers
and assorted Tupperware containers, 
transformed into shrines. There are conchs 
and lettered olives, turbans, tulips, and jewel boxes, 
moon shells and baby’s ears, a hundred miraculous signs. 
Bodies once encrusted in mud, wrapped in dull shrouds 
of fibrous periostracum, have been resurrected 
into these hard, gleaming skins 
the colors of incense. Even the skeletal, 
rubbery egg casing of a whelk 
articulates gracefully across the fingertips, 
like a rosary. By counting and naming these, 
your gifts, every starfish and shark’s tooth 
and tiny pale limpet, may Hannah learn 
the particular wonder of each, and hear, 
undiminished by the roaring of her own heart, 
the endless prayer of the sea.

(published in Oracle)