Originally published in Third Wednesday, Spring, 2021

Thousands of Horseshoe Crabs Wash up on a Long ISland Beach

—the ocean still too unconquered

for us to know why. All currents

should be explicable, every 

tide pool now mapped. A sudden 

misplaced wave of life 

should come not as a surprise, 

but as a song heard frequently 

and composed of specific notes: 

rising water temperatures,

krill populations, vibrations 

made by freight ships 

along their routes, 

groaning far over coral 

as if busy with the hymns

of someone else’s gods. 

Otherwise the ocean merely 

throws up its hands and squanders 

itself on shorelines, presenting scenes 

of mass beachings with no way 

to justify suddenly un-shouldering 

its burden, just a baby left 

on a stone step somewhere 

far from home. I want to know

what stirs the enormous pot,

buries islands, changes this history for 

even the smallest riders on its back. But 

it is like this: sometimes the owner 

simply takes the dog off the leash

and walks away. Nothing illuminates

certain abandonments; there is left only

a cold night outside a 

daycare, a car ride in silence

home along highways,

a wandering dog, a beach 

of upturned crabs like a 

roomful of needy students

waving their briny little legs

in question to the sky.