plaguily At first light a woman proceeds along the margin of the sea carrying beneath one arm a shallow basket in which lie the pale remains of those small creatures whose habitation the water has surrendered. At intervals she lowers herself and commits one to the sand and rises again without examining what has been left behind, and the spaces between these white emblems come into being by no reckoning that can be discerned in the ground itself but only by the measure she bears within her and which remains inaccessible even to her own accounting. The tide advances and withdraws. Wind moves over the open beach. Birds descend to the wrack and depart from it. Behind her pass those who seek what the sea relinquishes and those content merely to accompany the morning until it becomes day, and they alter their course among the scattered white forms without remark, each step entering into relation with those already taken so that the shore acquires an order that belongs neither to intention nor accident but to the continual acknowledgment that one thing follows another and that sequence itself possesses a gravity apart from purpose. She reaches into the basket. At length there remains nothing to remove from it. The sea continues in its exchanges with the land. The shells abide where they have been placed until they do not. The woman turns toward the light and goes on.
