I am no longer on Cape Cod. I caught a bus back earlier this evening and am now being crooned at by a small cat who was grievously neglected this weekend with only one human to answer his imperious calls for attention and food. The other small cat has taken up a Bast-pose near the couch and it suits her very well. The one thing I mind about traveling is the absence of cats.
I couldn't swim this afternoon, but I walked out as far as I could into the deep-bending glass-green water until I could feel the swell rocking and lifting me, the sand shifting from under my feet. Earlier I had seen tiny fish in the shallows, arrowing away from a trio of small children whose pursuit was enthusiastically splashy but no danger to the fry; when I stood still, the same tiny, silvery fish shoaled around me, as if I were a safe shadow. The tide was just starting to turn. I saw dead man's fingers washed up at the top of the tide-line, lime-green and branching like a rune. I saw a crab's carapace upturned like a coracle in a pile of soft brown algae and bladderwrack and another hunkered like a shield in a pale run of sand, algae-slicked at the edges as if with verdigris. The waves at the western end of the beach were thick with churned-up weed, but the water cleared the farther east I walked, until I was spending as much time looking down into the bulges and ripples of light on sand and sea-pebbles as out at the horizon where there were sailboats moving, motorboats, the ferry, three adolescents poling a raft. (Two of them were standing, the third kneeling at the prow. They looked like an Egyptian frieze minus the hunting cat and the reeds.) The sky was that late cloud-twisted blue that has more light in it than it looks; the sand was heavily golden by the time I walked back through the thicket of folding chairs and beach towels and umbrellas to find that someone had built a cairn of grey and tawny stones that remarkably resembled, at its top, the figure of a seagull or a duck. Some gulls were standing around looking smug. I walked with my feet in the water and kept thinking of Triton wrestled by Herakles—did the hero have to keep him above the high-water mark, off the sea's ground, before he would yield? I write that out and wonder if Mollie Hunter thought of it when she staged a wrestling match between a mortal guiser and an ancient selkie in A Stranger Came Ashore (1975). I know that I do better when I'm near the sea, not just to see and smell but touch it. I will return this week if I can.
I couldn't swim this afternoon, but I walked out as far as I could into the deep-bending glass-green water until I could feel the swell rocking and lifting me, the sand shifting from under my feet. Earlier I had seen tiny fish in the shallows, arrowing away from a trio of small children whose pursuit was enthusiastically splashy but no danger to the fry; when I stood still, the same tiny, silvery fish shoaled around me, as if I were a safe shadow. The tide was just starting to turn. I saw dead man's fingers washed up at the top of the tide-line, lime-green and branching like a rune. I saw a crab's carapace upturned like a coracle in a pile of soft brown algae and bladderwrack and another hunkered like a shield in a pale run of sand, algae-slicked at the edges as if with verdigris. The waves at the western end of the beach were thick with churned-up weed, but the water cleared the farther east I walked, until I was spending as much time looking down into the bulges and ripples of light on sand and sea-pebbles as out at the horizon where there were sailboats moving, motorboats, the ferry, three adolescents poling a raft. (Two of them were standing, the third kneeling at the prow. They looked like an Egyptian frieze minus the hunting cat and the reeds.) The sky was that late cloud-twisted blue that has more light in it than it looks; the sand was heavily golden by the time I walked back through the thicket of folding chairs and beach towels and umbrellas to find that someone had built a cairn of grey and tawny stones that remarkably resembled, at its top, the figure of a seagull or a duck. Some gulls were standing around looking smug. I walked with my feet in the water and kept thinking of Triton wrestled by Herakles—did the hero have to keep him above the high-water mark, off the sea's ground, before he would yield? I write that out and wonder if Mollie Hunter thought of it when she staged a wrestling match between a mortal guiser and an ancient selkie in A Stranger Came Ashore (1975). I know that I do better when I'm near the sea, not just to see and smell but touch it. I will return this week if I can.
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