In a past life we were queer women convalescing at the seaside

The sea grey and unyielding, as though
it’d been taking lessons from your eyes.

Nevertheless: your hands pressing a shell
into my palm, gritty with sand on one side,

blushing unexpected tangerine
on the other. A thing is always softer

on the inside, you said, and I wished you
hadn’t, flexed my lonely milquetoast hand

in my pocket over and over, thinking
about soft, thinking about the rosy dying

sun somewhere behind the thunderheads
dressed in sable for her mourning. Above,

the moon was another creature like us,
quadruple wrapped against the weather,

or else the possibility of touch, of recognition.
I told you my husband was not a bad man,

his fear of hysteria notwithstanding. You told me
your husband was an architect, your marriage

the agglomerate of an ecosystem.
See the sand, you said. See the gravel.

Many things that are one thing, parts of which
can be removed, like the shell in my pocket,

but the whole remaining indivisible before god.
Of course, god allows all kinds of divisions, even

some that might be blessings in disguise. I didn’t
want it, I confessed. But I cried for weeks after I lost it,

anyway. Perhaps that’s why, when I looked
around the beach, I saw it only as a dead thing:

flat water, broken rocks ground down to sand.
But you, you saw it as living, liveable, alive: tidepools

growing lavender in the dusk, pinpricks
pricked by breathing clams, the milty lace

of foam left by each wave. The truth is,
I saw nothing living but you: zip, zilch, nil.

I fear I have become nothing but absence,
I said, but I meant: make me a presence.

I meant, fill me with myself, made new
by your self. I would have drowned willingly

in the touch of a hypocorism from your lips
or the touch of your rosy interior. Instead, you

returned to your husband in the spring, and I
lingered by the seaside until I didn’t, lungs filling

with fluid one way or another. Darling, let me
ask: wasn’t any part of me worth taking with you?

Darling, tell me: was I the pearl, or merely
grit begging its way into the shell?