Crab Shells

Washed up by a sea whose fury had no need of them, they became an easy meal for gulls and other scavenger seabirds whose beaks tore through their undersides and feasted on the sweet flesh, then left their gutted shells to dry to a familiar salmon red among detritus of polished stones, sinuous ribbons of brown kelp and piles of blackened seaweed – all strewn about in a savage manner without order or meaning. I thought of Darwin, then of Bosch.* Darwin would have seen his theory as natural and vindicated. Bosch would have smiled at the chaos and changed it into art. *Hieronymous Bosch (1450?-1516), Dutch painter of irrational surreal images which scholars have yet to decipher.