Few places feel as alive as a shoreline, and D. L. Emblen's speaker keeps going back to one anyway, for reasons he cannot name. The poem opens with a question, "Why do I return each time to this sand coast," and by the end it has quietly answered it. What draws him is not the beauty of the sea but its evidence of death. The title, "Fascination After Death Symbols," announces this, and the poem then proves how many such symbols one stretch of coast can hold.
The first stanza sets the scene in objects that are all, in some way, relics. Manta rays are not swimming here but "hand-carved deep into the rocks," so even the living creature has become a carving. The lobster claws are "brittle," strung "along the beach" like necklaces, and the comparison does something unsettling: a thing once part of a body is now ornament. The second stanza hands back a second question, "What is there to be sought," and its answer seems to be nothing at all, only "waves and coves and slipping cliffs." The word "slipping" is worth noticing, because even the cliffs are in motion, slowly failing. The "miles of hard-packed sand as smooth as any highway" make the place feel flat and empty, a road that leads nowhere.
The third stanza is where the poem gathers its force. The speaker watches the sunset "disintegrate," a verb that belongs to decay rather than to the usual language of beauty. The sky becomes "a slowly spreading pain of yellow," the sea "inflamed," as if the whole horizon were a wound or an infection. Light does not set here; it sickens and breaks apart. Then comes the daytime counterpart: the rocks have "foreheads," a human feature, and their shadows fall across the sand. The landscape is being given a face, and a grim one. The final comparison completes the thought, with white boulders in the cliff described as "skulls imbedded in a catacomb." Stone and bone become interchangeable, and the cliff turns into a burial chamber.
The last two lines turn the camera on the speaker himself. Walking "from shore to surf," under the watching "hooded cormorants," he steps on "the skeletal remains of whole colonies of sea creatures." The hooded birds look almost like mourners or judges, and the speaker is implicated in the scene. He is not just observing death but trampling it, and the sand he walks on is made of it. The word "colonies" is a small shock: these were not single animals but whole communities, now reduced to underfoot grit. The poem ends without comment, with the crunch of that image left to speak for itself.
Structurally, the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the lines stretch long, sometimes running to a full sentence of observation, like the slow pace of someone walking and looking. The first two stanzas are questions, the third is a long, accumulating answer, and that shift from asking to showing is the poem's real movement. The speaker never states a conclusion about mortality; he simply lines up evidence until the reader reaches it first. The imagery also follows a quiet progression, from the decorative (carvings, necklaces) to the bodily (pain, inflammation, foreheads) to the plainly funereal (skulls, catacomb, skeletal remains). Death grows less abstract with each stanza.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about an odd human habit: being drawn to things that remind us we will end. The speaker does not claim to find comfort or wisdom at the shore. He admits only to fascination, and the poem lets that word stay uneasy. By the last line, the beach no longer looks like a holiday postcard but like a place built, grain by grain, from what has already died, and the speaker, walking over it, belongs to that story too.