Litany for the Half-Shell

Through the transport of words I seek you—

that conveyance older than vessels, older than salt.

 

You were available. Then you were not.

 

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I held the oyster shell close to my breast.

Only half. Only ever half.

 

Water seeping from its wound

the way grief refuses containment,

the way a mouth opens and cannot retrieve what it has released.

 

I wept at its emptiness.

Not for what was taken—for what remains:

the smooth ridges, the pressed muscle of where.

 

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Transport: to carry across.

To bear understanding from one shore of the self to another.

 

Sea lace, no longer weed but ornament.

Pearls unstrung, then strung, then scattered—

glistening as another's occasion for beginning.

 

Let them gather what the tide offers.

Let them call it fortune.

 

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Yet here: my shell. Hollowed.

The nacre where something lived

now only the architecture of lived.

 

I trace what held fast.

I do not ask it to hold again.