Ghost Crabs

At nightfall, as the sea darkens,

A depth darkness thickens, mustering from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,

To the sea s edge. To begin with

It looks like rocks uncovering, mangling their pallor.

Gradually the laboring of the tide

Falls back from its productions,

Its power slips back from glistening nacelles, and they are crabs.

Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland

Like a packed trench of helmets.

Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.

They emerge

An invisible disgorging of the sea s cold

Over the man who strolls along the sands.

They spill inland, into the smoking purple

Of our woods and towns--a bristling surge

Of tall and staggering specters

Gliding like shocks through water.

Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.

Their hungers are homing elsewhere.

We cannot see them or turn our minds from them.

Their bubbling mouths, their eyes

In a slow mineral fury

Press through our nothingness where we sprawl on beds,

Or sit in rooms. Our dreams are ruffled maybe.

Or we jerk awake to the world of possessions

With a gasp, in sweat burst, brains jamming blind

Into the bulb-light. Sometimes, for minutes, a sliding

Staring

Thickness of silence

Presses between us. These crabs own this world.

All night, around us or through us,

They stalk each other, they fasten onto each other,

They mount each other, they tear each other to pieces,

They utterly exhaust each other.

They are the powers of this world.

We are their bacteria,

Dying their lives and living their deaths.

At dawn, they sidle back under the sea s edge.

They are the moil of history, the convulsion

In the roots of blood, in the cycles of concurrence.

To them, our cluttered countries are empty battleground.

All day they recuperate under the sea.

Their singing is like a thin seawind flexing in the rocks of a headland,

Where only crabs listen.

They are God's only toys.