Aliens singing
I don't have a great desire to share beautiful sounds. And there are so many ! The rooster's Trumpy trumpet every morning next door, or the faithful hum of HVAC from the nursing home through the woods. Even my tinnitus has a certain beauty, whistling away at high C in the background at all hours. It's a sound tiny angels might make, the voices of aliens singing.
What I want to share about today's walk is not the rushing liquid traffic sound the ocean was making. Instead I want to share what I saw: the pleasingly concentric dimples in the sand, the surprising length of a tiny pebble's shadow, the grace of a wave sweeping up and thinning on the low-tide beach, then rilling downhill to the surf.
Or the shell of an unremarkable clam. Its shape perfection made more perfect. Precisely ovoid with a minutely irregular edge; its shadow is a black fist on a thin film of beach-water.
The shell could be the cupped and upturned palm of a hand, the shadow-fist its alter ego. Or, I think, it is one wing of a grounded butterfly. I see that its matching shell-half has been broken off close to the hinge. I imagine the shard that remains as the butterfly's abdomen.
I’ve found an alabaster angel with the wing blown off, come to the beach to die.
Reaching into my imagination for these likenesses, I have the feeling of capturing or simulating the beauty of what I saw. This is be the illusion of writing. I may find the images beautiful or interesting, but that's a different thing than this simple shell or the complex chord of feelings it stirred up in me. Having sounded once, that chord has been carried away in the traffic of the sea.
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