It all ends up here

IT ALL ENDS UP HERE, YOU KNOW

by Schubert Moore

            I live at the beach. If you don’t, if you’re like most, you wish you did. Why is that? What is it about the edge of the earth, where the sand meets the surf?

            In summer on weekends and holidays you stake your claim to your patch of sand with beer and blanket that hold your fragile family, your cute kids. Beginnings are so sweet.

            Why did you come? To escape the heat? Was it the scent? Or for some other reason you can’t quite say. 

            But it’s winter now. The rain comes in level and hard, thin things, shingles, siding, tin signs, wind chimes, flying. 

            You can smell the sea before you see it, metallic, salty, some say, but it’s bacteria feeding on seaweed and plankton dying. Dimethyl sulfide. Beginning and ending. The smell of birth. The smell of death.

            The sea sits rocking, does it not, a deep, cold question, like the widow turning one hundred in Kansas City who said, I want to see the ocean before I die.

            You’re drawn here. You’re drawn back.

            We’re closer to the truth now.

             If you walk the sand some, you will see enough of death to last you a lifetime.

The beach is littered with the afterlife of broken shells your precious children bring in their hands. They spy a seagull skeleton, a feather here and there, sometimes a vortex of gulls pointing at a seal, recumbent in the rollers, its eyes picked out.

            You’re not the only one coming. It all ends up here, you know. When we clear cut, you can see the hillside in the river after a rain, turning the stream brown.            

            Solitary Hood, white Denali, absolute Everest, the slices of stone Himalayas, the brutal Rockies, their rough edges are being carved and smoothed. You know, of course, you can polish anything away. They will all be here one day.           

             Amazon, Potomac, Yellow, Blue Danube, Green River, silt carried down Big Muddy, the mighty Columbia, the river makes its bed, soiled, cleans itself. The rivers serve the sea.

            You wiggle your toes in sand that was Idaho, Utah, Colorado and who can say what else?

            You’re using the wrong scale. Push the marks apart from decades to eons.

            Give water time. We have plenty of that.

            Water will have its way.

            Even the earth’s core will come. Volcanoes vomit boiling rock, cooled, rain-washed, worn, carried by the rivers, it will all be here sometime.

            You will, too. No matter where you die, Minneapolis or Mumbai, if you’re kept in the Pyramids or in a vase on the mantel, given enough time, an eon or two, atoms equally distribute. Some particle of you, star born and still here, will come to my beach. Eventually entropy wins.

            You’re coming back.

            You must know this now, leaning on your cane as your grandchildren bring you shells bleached to a whiteness you’ve understood all your life, in your bones.

            I’ll be here, too, to greet you, part of me, anyway.