WILD SEED AT THE ILLUSORY EDGE

   Still must I on, for I am as a weed,
   Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam, to sail
   Where'er the surge may sweep.
                                      -Lord Byron

I drive to the edge of the ocean. (Literally--had I chosen I suppose I could have driven into the ocean as well damned car culture "Beaches are Texas public highways" Padre Island National Seashore Health and Safety Tips--but I chose instead to get out & walk.) Things are not what they seem here--shifting...elusive. Solid is liquid. Liquid solid. Fowl mimic water, insect mimics plant.

I walk along thick pillow mounds of springy red seaweed piled up at high-tide's boundary. A demarcation red flag between salt water and sand. This is the edge where two unlike environments come together to form a third world of illusion.

Waves seem to be flowing in to shore yet they tow out below. Shore birds plunge kamikaze from the sky into the sea yet lift up again unharmed. Shifting waters sifting silt in glittering diamonds seem uncertain as quicksand yet hold firm underfoot. This water will not quench your thirst.

Round bubbles fly, skimming like sailboats across shallow puddles just beyond the lapping tongues of the waves.

This threshold creates mythical beasts whose lives demand just such a chameleon reality. They have learned to become as it is.

Warpaint red-striped gulls fly low at the edge of the waves with lower mandible slung low to catch whatever might be there for the catching. Perhaps they are harvesting the creatures who seem nothing more than a gelatinous orange strip of kelp blown by the wind until you realize they are flipping about of their own free will. Like a fish out of water.

Large pelicans in solemn brown lines--the flight of the flock itself flowing like water the first one rises, then the next and the next and even then the first one falls low and the next then the next. A wave flight.

There are creatures who wait under the edge for the tide to go out so they can pop open the wet sand to breathe air. Ghost crabs additionally inhabit the twilight portal between night and day. The gulls seek them out in the sunset but the wily crabs wait at the bottom of their tunnels until the afterglow fades from the white crests.

Exciting place this organically defined edge. An organic parameter generating organic response phenomenon.

I walk the shore a long way. The salt and stick of the water cling to my skin, clump my hair. Fine silt sand enters and sifts through my blood. Suffused with shimmery quartz, mica, glass. Crystalline, I wade towards the sad, pink moon rising up from the salt sea.

Laying back on the waves, I let the riptide carry me where it will. I am a grain of silica. I am a wild seed.

6/7/2001
Ingrid Karklins