Dead Shark at New Beach, and: Famine Ships, and: Boletes in September

Dead Shark at New Beach

1

Name synonymous with hunger, carnage,but this one was peaceful, floated near the waves’ surface,sweeping the water open-mouthed for plankton and krill.Was struck most likely by a fishing boat,hit broadside, stunned, and washed to shore.

The thirty-foot shark comes apart in a pool behind a dune,at the end of a channel wound through lifting grass.The full moon tide lifted him over the hump of the high beachand laid him in this souring pool, filled and emptied by tides.

The body sways in slowest currents—unnatural movement, pitch and heave of parts tearing,the body ripped and broken,undone by sun and air, by surge and pulland undulation of the tide’s last reach, unmakinglinks of cartilage, gristle, sinew, flesh,loosing muscles and organs, the trailing spume of intestinesreleasing a cloud on the still water, a pale green foam.

2

The gulls stand back, wary of our approach.Standing in a half circle, they stab and jostle for position,then swoop in, crying, to tear at shreds of meat and creamy flesh,and fly off with ragged banners of skin flapping in their beaks.

Annoyed, they flap up and circle as we near,then settle back to resume their slow feeding,piece by piece digesting tons of shark.And slow and diligent, the flies and crawling thingswork between knuckles of cartilage, along the spine,all discs and fiber, cleaned of its softness.Knots of vertebrae shine in the new light.

Up close the stench of rot rises, billowing,as the corpse releases its gassesand microbes continue multiplying their hungers.

What eats this giant is small, and smaller yet,more numerous even than small, undeterredby death smell. What overcomes him now—the thousand mouths, insatiable.

3

Worm-burrowed, flea-swarmed,drawn and quartered, bloated with seawater, the bodybecomes abstract, no creature now, no one.Each wrench and tear releases new vapors,a miasma of juices, foul odors we breathe with the sea spray.His death swims the air; we taste him in particles.

Praise for the large and powerfulwho feed so many in their undoing.Praise for the stink of decay, and the sweet fleshpickling in the brine of backwash flats,and this hunger devouring what remains.Praise the fleas, and the wormsthat crawl through his flesh, the flies and germstranslating his ruin into themselves,and through all their generations.

4

So many lives passed through this one; he grazedthe ocean like a field, devoured acres of wave.Filtering tons of water, he drank the body of ocean,like a mother flowing into him. Swallowed little fishand larvae and sea worms, and the tiny, transparent,soft-fleshed shrimp, and the plankton that bloomin warming waters and breathe oxygen into the air.All that swept into his gaping mouth, streamedthrough that vast muscle of body, swimming.Now they swim out of him in clouds,in particles that foul the murky water.

The tide is going out, draining the warm pools,waves lapping at the body that rises now,exposed on dry ground.And we see how huge he is, and how broken.What catastrophe has befallen this leviathan,stranded here beyond the waves’ urging,derelict wreck on the brightening sand.

5

He lies in parts, torn and scattered,seawater trickling around him.The ocean is fifty yards awayon the other side of a sand bank.You can’t see the waves breaking from herebut molecules of salt infuse the airand make it sharp. Sea spray lilts at our faces.They are swimming out of him

in particles, in ooze, the multitudes. He is flowingback into the sea; he is rising on wings,he is burrowing into wet sand. A thousandthousand lives washed through him, livedthrough him, now take him back in atoms and bits,in breaths and bird cries, and scramble of legs.

In the last pull of the tide,at the end of that flowing, a...