Quahoging Soon After First Light

The bay spreads out

over the sleeping machines of god,

a pale blue sky reflected
in the water.
the heavens I drag the rake through

wading
in the early tide

Black clouds boiling up
as I pull across muddy bottom,
scratching for that clink
you can feel
and hear in the wood handle

A few stray gnats,
blue jays and crows that started up in the dark
an hour ago,
gulls crying farther

offshore from the marsh
Mummichogs flit by
as I find and toss the same rocks
I must have dug up and hucked a dozen times,

split and blackened.
skipping across the water, or falling
with a plunk

Rotted conchs, moon shells,
cockles, angel wings,
the fanned scallops grown over with weeds,
a lush decaying empire

to sort through
before lifting the first buried hard shell
into the light,
streaked white and blue-grey with mud.
and then
more in this honev hole
I happen onto

The sound of an occasional car
drifts from the shore road
and I go on, scratching
through the reflected heavens
for that taste of warm salty broth
and whatever it is
we can grasp from
the mystery in this fecund mud
we are of
suspended
in the ever-changing tide,
waist deep in earth and sky