swells of seaweed, plant wanderers, wave drifters, 
burlap sacks, ropes of polypropylene, one beat-up duck-boot – all 
  
		made of language – scraps of mollusks, flints of calcium carbonate

poking up from beach sand – abraded quartz and limestone – or from hard silt ridges
below tide-line revealing green sea glass, an old Moxie bottle top and

someone’s spent prophylactic, showing how the spawn
generates, eventually, from inland seas, dumping am-

phibians upon a landmass green with a new phylum a new order to take dominion

and the body straightway changes color, chameleon, and form, rock-
clasper, tree-climber, two-footer, evolver

into this morning’s clots of fog where shell-collectors seem to float in and out 
 
	of existence, scumbled, then daubed in pink bikinis or blue swimsuits, 

bent over green plastic shovels, unearthing from the bubbling 

mudflats the clams that will open

in tonight’s pit of seaweed and fire 

and surrender their soft anatomies, almost human –  

mouth and gut, heart and nerve, intestine, anus, 
labial palps (those first antecedents of lips and language) and one powerful 

burrowing foot (tunneling away) – surrender 

to the grasper’s opposable thumbs, the sucker’s bilabial lips.