D. L. Emblen's poem begins at a street corner and ends at the edge of everything. The title pairs something almost comically specific, a stretch of road named Chalcedony Street, with something vast and final, and the poem lives in the gap between the two. What follows is a vision of a future so far off that it has its own name, "the Latter Year," when human civilization has become geology. The speaker imagines the coast where we stand now, emptied of people and returned to the sea and its scavengers.
The poem's central idea is that the world does not mourn us. Nothing in these lines is angry or elegiac; the future is described with a flat, almost pleasant calm. The waves "whisper in and out," the birds "have their beach again," and the dead seals may lie there "stinking / as long as they want." That last phrase carries the poem's whole attitude. The stench that would drive human beings off a beach is simply permitted, even indulged. Our standards of cleanliness, beauty and order have dissolved along with us, and the beach belongs to whoever is left.
The imagery is built around bones, and the poem takes its time getting there. The opening picture is of "long thin spirals of smoky time" rising from "a desert of remnant artifacts." Time itself becomes smoke, something that drifts off a burnt-out ruin, and our whole culture shrinks to "artifacts," the word an archaeologist uses for the things left behind by people who can no longer explain them. Then comes the boldest image: the beach as "a grinning, lip-less mouth / for the skull of a continent." The coastline is personified as a face stripped of flesh, and the grin is the unsettling grin of a skull, fixed and meaningless. Scale does the work here. A continent has a skull, and the sea laps at its teeth.
The poem then shrinks that image rather than expanding it. The hollow sound of the waves is compared to "Mojave winds" moving "in and out the sockets of a rabbit skull." The comparison drops from the continental to the tiny, and from the ocean to the desert. It is a strikingly precise detail, a small bleached skull with wind passing through the empty eye-holes. By matching a continent to a rabbit, the poem suggests that death has the same texture at every size, and that our grandest civilization sounds, when it is gone, like a small animal's remains in a dry wind. The repeated "in and out" in both the waves and the wind reinforces this, making the two sounds one rhythm of breathing without a body.
The second stanza turns from bones to life, and the change is the poem's quiet twist. The birds gather "along the lacy lines of tiny skeletons and crusted bits of seaweed / that mark the circumference of each new effort of the sea." The word "lacy" is wonderfully odd, making the debris of the tideline delicate, almost decorative, and "each new effort of the sea" gives the ocean a patient, restless industry, as if it were drawing and redrawing the shoreline by hand. Death here is not an ending but raw material, and the birds, the seals and the seaweed all carry on within it.
Structurally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed meter. Its lines vary sharply in length, from the single word "hollowly," isolated on its own line, to the long, slowly accumulating line about the tideline. That lone adverb works almost like an echo, the poem pausing to let the empty sound ring. The long sentences move like the tide itself, rolling in with clauses and settling back.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal of drama. Many visions of the end of the world are loud, full of fire and warning. Emblen's is gentle and observant, and for that reason more haunting. The poem asks the reader to stand at the foot of an ordinary street and imagine the ordinary sea outlasting it, without cruelty and without sympathy.