Beach Glass   by Amy Clampitt

While you walk the water's edge, 
turning over concepts
 I can't envision, the honking buoy 
serves notice that at any time 
the wind may change, 
the reef-bell clatters 
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra 
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
 than keeping open old accounts 
that never balanced, 
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.

It behaves 
toward the permutations of novelty--
driftwood and shipwreck, last night's 
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up 
residue of plastic -- with random 
impartiality, playing catch or tag 
or touch - last like a terrier, 
turning the same thing over and over,
 over and over. For the ocean, nothing 
is beneath consideration.

The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles 
have been abandoned here, it's hopeless 
to know which to salvage. Instead 
I keep a lookout for beach glass--
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almadén and Gallo, lapis
 by way of (no getting around it, 
I'm afraid) Phillips' 
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare 
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
 of no known origin.

The process 
goes on forever: they came from sand, 
they go back to gravel, 
along with the treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed astonishments of Chartres, 
which even now are readying 
for being turned over and over as gravely
 and gradually as an intellect 
engaged in the hazardous redefinition of structures 
no one has yet looked at.