Postcard

for a hundred feet across the sand,
a smooth path dragged along the edge
of eelgrass in the wintry
duned behing egg island, the way
a gardener might haul a sack of kelp home

but then the runic prints of a great blue heron
alongside,proof of the culprit,n where
the dragging ended the hand,
black,glovelike,human
almost with its gray individual nails

not claws, not reptilian, but mammalia

nails, a development beyond flipper

n fin. Then the attached skeletal armature,

a limb picked clean from its brief radius

n ulna to the scapula's finality

i will not write Wish you here with u

sunblock n umbrella. The winter beach

is not the summer beach. It was a seal, I'd guess,

strayed too far from the salt refuge

to wherever the pack trapped her

Useless to wonder here,

her parts divvied up n distributed among

the pillagers n scrounges of the earth

n air, who know when you're near

n r gone