"Low Tide Evening."
"On the bus from the West Coast of Ireland,
a woman stares past rain pooling on the window,
clover fields hemmed in by rough stone.
The man next to her has fingers trapped in a botanical book.
He sleeps.
She knows that south of Galway where
they strayed through terraced shales and gray-blue limestone
searching for fossils, the sea licks pale lichens
off the rocks.
And everywhere, the spirits are hungry.
So you leave a crust of bread on your plate.
A hundred of them could last for weeks or less.
If you said a prayer with your meal,
the offering might feed a multitude.
But then the sea always asks for more.
She closes her eyes, the cool consequence
of creatures that glided through ancient sea beds.
I travel half the world, and still I feel chased.
She thinks of dinner with the man, sawdust floors,
a mussel split and rusty against the polished ebony of the bowl,
its sea smell like the beach at low tide,
walking through the inhuman hour when the world resolves
into a single blue pane of stained glass, the goals
and shadows involved with one thing only--
hunger.
She is suddenly aware of her desire for him
across the table, next to him in the bus.
But it makes her shiver the way those shells split apart
like half black moons that gave off no light, only shadows.
And they were legion."