14) In time, layers accumulate; but the blood radiates fluorescence—surely, no one can be so hard as to forget. Cavafy said, remember not only how much you were loved/ not only the beds you lay on. And I do, it’s all I seem to do these days. This patient shedding, this hope that at the end, something remains that won’t simply disintegrate, turning almost indistinguishable from the sand. Once, we picked up the shell of a horseshoe crab on the shore of a barrier island. Decades ago, the wrecks of ships lay there uncollected. Oystercatchers, gull-billed tern and plover breed there now, on quiet beaches clean as parchment.
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