Laura McCullough Ravishment After Mark Doty’s “The Green Crab’s Shell” Splendor and splendor he said about the crab’s cast off carapace, artifact of a life, a life like his the man contemplating the inside of his own skin metaphor and metaphor like fish aimed at the same source; cows shuttled toward the same slaughter, different each time; or the dimpled scar of a pic line, the nipped belly smile of a surgical birth; maybe the line over a brow of a child a mother was too tired to take to the ER for stitches. Oh walker on the beach, Oh kneeler before small evidence, your face close to death showing us all what reflects in his face reflects us all. Except where was he when those birds descended? And was the crab already dying? Surely beached and dying like the man suffering at the shoreline of his own life and those he loves the tide the only proof any of us exist unknowable except for these artifacts of mind, broken and revealing only the smallest glimmer of how we shone. Except if we were lucky enough to attract danger and be lifted by some awful bird— and admit it, we are all scavengers— to the sky we always craved and couldn’t have, then to be crushed or to crash as the bird will also be, a wing without its body feathers riffling the old whispered song, a lost dog noses it, takes it carries it only so far; the dog wants a man; the man wants a dog; no one wants crabs or gulls, scuttling/soaring/scavenging exquisite irreducible watch the dog chase the waves back out, the man step back as it comes in.

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