We slipped away before the tide
and stood by the outcropping, fingering
a wall fluted with smoothed fragments
of crushed and blackened mollusks
embedded within chalky Pleistocene sand.

Walking the beach by the Anastasia Formation,
blown rock draped with lichen,
caught in a zone between ocean, mangrove,
pluming spray and wind,
one osprey observing from a branch
horizontal over the lagoon.

We weren’t there to make a life for ourselves;
trespassing beyond sedges, rushes,
grass of a later age,
then finding at island’s edge,
coquina—

abraded, winnowed, fractured—
having it to ourselves
not as vision but as place
all that afternoon.