Delaware Bay Reunion

 

 

I dragged my former roommate Brian to watch the migrant sandpipers assembled for horseshoe crab spawning. Though it was June, and the years of overharvesting crabs had started, we still found crowds of Red Knots and Ruddy Turnstones, which Brian, a word-botcher, decided were called runny turdstones. Both rust-black-and-white, the knots are brush-stroked and the turnstones are stenciled by a car-customizer—you should look them up. A few Semipalmated Plovers scurried from bug to bug. And all along the sand were horseshoe crabs, creeping seemingly at random, or wrecked and desiccated, their moving parts exposed. Their iron-gray roe lay in swaths and swales. 

 

      The same eggs over and over,
     the same birds. Doesn’t the tide
     wash the piper and plover
     shit to where algae ride? 

 

As we walked through the flocks, the birds leaving bubbles of space around us, I couldn’t resist learning what they were tasting. I pinched up a few eggs and lipped them in. Brian said, “Jerry!” I grinned, strode on, and didn’t say “What’s the problem?” I’d hardly partaken as luridly as when Galway Kinnell ate bloody droppings of the bear he was tracking. The difference is that I really did it. Sorry, that’s unfair to you. Anyway, I presume I’m too old to publicly put whatever in my mouth. Are you also? The eggs were salty and sour; you’re missing nothing but a boast of abasement.

 

King Canute gormandized on Red Knots fattened with bread and milk, legend says. Like its namesake, Calidris canutus cannot hold off the waves, but we may be creeping between greed and need.