Outer Lands, and: The Marshes Have No Memory

Outer Lands

I'll tell you the story. I was walkingthe outer edge of the outer lands

where sporadic signs staked in duneswarned to keep distant from the mammals;

in fact, there were critical acts in placeto enforce nonmolestation,

but between me and the sea a sealappeared to be having a time of it,

rocked and moaned in a deepening birth,as if trying to summon momentum

to roll down the beach toward water.In short, it seemed stuck and—it's never far off

in the imagination—dying. I thoughtI should bring sea to the seal. I filled

a detergent bottle at the surf and calledthe seal "buddy." "You OK, buddy?"

as the tide went this way, then that,with no sense of intention. An hour before,

I had encountered a friend on this beach,both of us having walked through our pasts

to that moment. Now he was goneand I was supposed to be in the mountains

but the mountains were on fire.From the highway that morning

I watched smoke plumes risein each far valley and drove past my exit

straight for the coast, straight intothis story where I gathered

armloads of kelp, making a damp bedfor the seal. Increasingly, my efforts

bore the whiff of not science,but ritual. I consulted the experts

I wasn't too embarrassed to ask.On my phone I found a video

of a seal snared in Ocean Shores,two cops hunched above it, jabbing

at tangled fishing lines with utility knivesas the seal lurched, as the cops jolted

from its teeth. A crowd in sweaters gatheredas the camera narrowed to tattooed flames

on a bicep clenched around the seal.Beyond this, straggling clouds from Constable

on the horizon, bright light at their edgesreflected in mud. Then one officer

walked toward the SUV, retrieving a club, I feared,though he returned with a stick and wire loop—

one for the dogs they don't shoot, presumably.He fastened the catch at the seal's neck

and drove its head into sand until the body stilled,suddenly submissive. What looked like choking

wasn't—this time—and the line was cut,and the catch was loosed, and the seal's

arched back bounded for ocean. The algorithmurged me further: a sea otter pup rescued

by blond hero in board shorts; a stranded whalein Weymouth; a lone porpoise found

in a British farmer's field fifty miles fromthe ocean. Here's the thing: I was looking

at the way things had happened in the worldfor evidence of how the world would happen.

Which never works. Each day bearssome crucial variance. And I knew this,

practically had it written on a coffee mug,but when I was there, and when there

was then, I had to say stop—and let redfill the harbor, and let red wash the shore,

and vow never to touch another living thingfor fear of how my being human might kill it.

The Marshes Have No Memory

Man drove horse hard. Graythoroughbred, half-brother

to Guillotine. One day: heart attack.Reins dropped. Carriage wrecked.

The horse collapsed. No marshremembers its avocets. Bird watchers

and egg thieves lust froma jetty half-demolished to foil

raiding ships. Of whichthe marshes have no memory.

Knowing only how the huge sunparticipates in fields of datura.

How light steps unblemishedthrough vexations of prickly ash.

Over the marshes. And thenthe marshes themselves move on.