Price includes framing.

Sanderlings by Shelley A. Leedahl

Morning’s first human footprints on Combers Beach.
Irregular waves hammer barnacle-crusted islets,
and much closer, flood current chases our hiking boots.
Go on, keep trying: we can play this game
in our slickers all day.

Kelp-tangle. Gulls rummage out oyster and crab bits.
And there, a kindergarten of sanderlings
plays follow the leader, leaving beak-pecked Braille in the sand
beside a calligraphy of washed-ashore eel grass.
Moon and egg yolk jellyfish, crustaceans: the shoreline’s story
of textural opposites. Its syllables feel good on the tongue.

You climb a slick outcrop
to capture what a camera simply can’t:
the Pacific’s animal rawness. Violence and vitality.
There you are, becoming smaller
in the distance, closer to the edge and roar.
Could this be the top of life?

Where Combers meets Long Beach,
I too find a rocky rise. White crustose lichen flowers
the rocks. On the horizon, the last breaths of sea fog
become nothing, and my tongue tastes like salt.

Shuck boots, peel off socks. Jeans rolled to shins—
not high enough.
My sprained right ankle, your plagued Achilles tendon—
both relieved in the numbing surf.

The comical sanderlings are obsessed: black legs blur
as they race in sync toward receding waves.
And here come the birders
with notable lenses and tripods
to seize the rare snowy plover on the scene.

You stick-draw our initials in the sand.
I pocket a brown-and-tan oyster shell.
Everything I fear and desire—erased.
Here, I only am.