Her weird bride’s tiny body once lay bent inside a shell,
the shell a locket, she a photograph. Held by a metal

clasp, the memento of a larger portable romance.
Who hung her there, who kept her for his sake is God, and so

she hovered over the circumference of all four oceans
before born of a bird, who kept her warm until she came

out, bruised by shell and slick with yolk. The little space she takes up:
a little spit lost in a glass of juice. The scarcely-there line of pantyhose.

Her eternal wristbone ticks behind a thick watch, kept
from total disappearance by a pair of straps, she stands

a strand of semi-precious stones. The whole rim of the beach
glisters baroque with pearl, diaspora of unchosen

shells, vestment of the pacific crust, an ephod of lace.

She attends the beach where there’s a congregation gathered
to cast ashes. She doesn’t know the woman

whose decease has caused this. The woman has been carried here
in a circular can, the kind one might throw eggshells in.

She knows no elegies, just litanies, just knows what God
does, knows the living body’s need for salt, the body’s need

for other bodies, the body’s need to wrap itself, some
times in kelp. She came to feel something old against her heel again,

something borrowed from the desert, a little of the earth
come loose. And there was nothing to do in the temple, there

was no way to curl up. Everything was grief-proofed, rubber
at the edges. The mourners gather close. They look more like

God in the way they gather clustered, near the abalone.
I am a tiny bee, she thinks, dancing in the world’s shutter.