While you walk the water's edge, turning over concepts I can't envision, the honking buoy serves notice that at any time the wind may change, the reef-bell clatters its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra to any note but warning. The ocean, cumbered by no business more urgent than keeping open old accounts that never balanced, goes on shuffling its millenniums of quartz, granite, and basalt. It behaves toward the permutations of novelty- driftwood and shipwreck, last night's beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up residue of plastic-with random impartiality, playing catch or tag ot touch-last like a terrier, turning the same thing over and over, over and over. For the ocean, nothing is beneath consideration. The houses of so many mussels and periwinkles have been abandoned here, it's hopeless to know which to salvage. Instead I keep a lookout for beach glass- amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase of Almadeacuten and Gallo, lapis by way of (no getting around it, I'm afraid) Phillips' Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst of no known origin. The process goes on forever: they came from sand, they go back to gravel, along with treasuries of Murano, the buttressed astonishments of Chartres, which even now are readying for being turned over and over as gravely and gradually as an intellect engaged in the hazardous redefinition of structures no one has yet looked at.
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