Holly Day
all along the sand, little crabs dart in
and out of tiny holes, waving their pincers in the
air, always opening, closing, trying to catch the bits of detritus washed up from the sea
swiveling back and forth, like a party of insane
ballroom dancers. Their only audience
the buzzing piles of dried out seaweed, infested with tiny flies that are as deaf
as the crabs to the music that directs the charade; here, what is
music, really—is it the noise made by the fingers on a piano, or the
movements of the fingers themselves, the notes of the piano inconsequential? The sea
is an instrument in itself, played by an insane
demigod that the natives stopped believing in long ago, an audience
dead for over a thousand years, deaf
to even the most thunderous roar of the surf. The sunset is
atonal here, a misplaced step in
choreography. Against the blue waters of the
seas, the red fingers of dying sunlight set even the crabs off. They run insane
from their daytime hiding places, pouring out onto the sand like an audience
fleeing a burning theater. Deaf
to the sound of high tide, small ones are caught up in waters too deep to escape.
