Beachcomber

I keep finding blue-green bottle buoys, bits of cork and slats bearing oriental characters — remnants of refuse dumped into the Kuro Siwo. And some days there are many chunks of redwood limbs, the shaggy bark worn away, the fibrous wood so steeped in sea water that it can hardly float Whole logs come ashore and broken spars, and once a tumbleweed, fallen from the cliffs at Pt. Concepcion. I never pick up shells anymore, or old shoes or splintered tuna poles or sections of hawsers, mop handles, denim shirts or dead seals. I keep looking for a thick-bottomed, hand-blown flask, one that has bobbed about for eighty-five hundred miles or so, with a note in it from a distressed maiden, or maybe a little wine.