Bone Beach

There’s a beach I found Somewhere on the coast of Massachusetts. Its sand is ivory white Unblemished by seaweed or driftwood. You have to walk through the forest to get there, But the skeletal trees stop just at the beach, As if afraid to cross an unspoken border. It has appeared to me only in Winter, Although I’m sure it is somewhere in Summer Hidden by the newly resurrected leaves As life returns to its shores. It is dead in Winter though The waves high and angry, but sluggish, Dead, Unspeakably black, Crashing haphazardly on the ivory beach. No dead branches let their bony fingers creep past the border They twist together, pushing against an imaginary wall But never passing the point where earth turns to sand. The sky is a lazy, bloated, bluish gray, The sun, the blind eye of a corpse, Useless. I used to visit this beach often, Finding its melancholy anesthetic. I would fight my way through the trees, Ducking under their caution tape branches. I noticed, On my eighth visit, That the sand wasn’t made of rocks or shells, But tiny bits of bone. Somehow, So many corpses, Had found their way to this cove, That they replaced the sand. I do not know how they found their way here, Whether drowned, dumped or eaten, or jumped. Carried by the waves. Had they created the deadness of the scene? Or had they been drawn to it by a preexisting stink of death. There is no hope for identification or autopsy, These bones can’t tell their stories, Can’t be separated. They are nothing but sand, Only the earth. That day I left the beach, Leaving behind the ghosts and bodies. I knew not how I had crossed the threshold Found myself in a world of the dead. I didn’t care, knowing only that I didn’t belong. I scrubbed the bones from my body, Standing under steam for hours Watching them slip down the drain, Starting the long journey home. I knew better than to return, My blood has no business there, My bones can wait for the day When the ocean carries me back To the shore of bones.