Free Having Everything Right by Robert Michael; Kim; Pyle Stafford Page B

was easier to stop. The inland dune glittered white above the tide-line. I held my hand above my eyes. It was a midden, a packed hill of rotted shell where the Indians had opened clams together. Generations of cockles to make one human life; generations of those lives to make a low hill waves had begun to carve. When I climbed it, deer in the meadow beyond bounded away into the blue-flowered scrub.
    The hillside where the deer had fled was steep above the cove. The old ones had a narrow place to be happy together. Rocks clucked at the sliding water, the seals spoke now and then. There was a great distance in a small space. Before my face where I lay down, wind made the tiny seeds of the grass sway where they were tethered.
    I walked south in the trance of heat, at the rim of hunger. Walking was what the wind did, the sun. It had nothing to do with destination. Not a plan, but a way of being. Where I stopped, the seals were clustered offshore, bobbing in the water between two arms of rock.I was a stranger. They were older with the place. I lay down on the sand, my arms tight to my sides, my feet together. Became a shape for water. They murmured and came closer. They climbed onto the rocks. The curiosity came between us. All about me on the sand were the curved prints of their bodies where the tide had beached them high, where they had slept a while, then elbowed down to the water. Now they said one syllable with all its inflections— oh, oh, oh, oh —from deep in the body. The seals go down into another world, then come back to tell that.
    Behind the beach was another midden, the white strata of shell deep in the bank waves had opened, had spilled. The bright slope I climbed was littered with whole, old abalone shell, each moon-shape just shy of full, with a curved line of bubbles spiraling out from where it began. Clamshell crumbled like ash under my feet, and the white bone too long to not be whale-rib flaked away when I bent to touch it.
    My hand closed over a hammerstone: a cylindrical shape with a rim at the top for my first finger to curve under. The striking face at the bottom was worn down by shell of clam and shattered acorn. It was heavy, hot like the sand it came from, just the blunt, thick shape of a man. It was a tool of abundance even as it opened a hull or shell. The works of food and pleasure had a single way in this stone; each motion with it was a blessing.
    Somewhere up the hill, in a private midden of their own, the bones of the maker lay. I climbed the white slope, my shoes filling with sand. Above, on the uneroded midden roof, a fawn lay still, bunched on its side as if running, the small black hooves joined to the leg-bones in a white articulation repeated in the multiple curve of rib, the compact flex of spine, in the skull turned back over the shoulder, the small jaw open. It moved yet it did not. It slept, more than slept. Coyote would have scattered the bones. It must have been vulture or crow pared away all color from it, all flesh.
    Where I knelt in the grass to know this, at the tip of a grass stem, the flat, round body of the tick reached yearning toward me. I held my finger out. She clung to the grass with two feet, the other six flailing the air. I was the prey, she the predator courting me, embrace aching in her arms. In the old tale it was Coyote who heard the tick call, “Darling, darling, will you marry me?” And then the tick climbed onto his back and they walked away. Soon, the tick was the greater of the two. Soon, Coyote clung to a twig and called to travelers, “Darling, darling, will you marry me?” Things are powerful in proportion to their smallness. This one came blindly onto my finger, not now in haste, having found the broad landscape of desire, to begin the deep kiss that fulfills her life. There is one feast; all are invited. The clam, the fawn, the crow. The tick, the shaper of the stone.
    But the two of us would be hungry for a time. With a buttercup