Survival of the Sea Star

Whoa, you say, and point
past the splintered shells, bits of coquina,
to a sea star—black underside, a trim of copper scales—
upon the wet, gray wash. I take the picture,
you toss it back.

We walk back across a spine of dunes,
push through a tide of wind,
back to a house on stilts, sit on the porch,
in chairs of heckled wood, our skin
still blazing with the winter wind.

I pour shots for us, cheap scotch.
A sea star isn’t fragile, you tell me, its arms
pry clams apart, break tight hinges—and this
is the amazing thing—the way their bellies prowl,
harvesting a sweetness from the shell.

We gaze into a haze, a faintness
seething in the sun. I pour two more
and think of work I’ve done, of oceans tended—
of sizzling steel, blood-red magnesium. The furnaces ran cold,
filled with the ice of time.

The sea star is a belly-wanderer, survives
a century of filth, while muscling through
oil spills, DDT, raw sewage,
used syringes, and the wasted fuel
from the navy’s fleet of nuclear subs.

Tomorrow, the sun will shadow everything
of wave and sand. We’ll hike into the wind,
which carves us into something
we can’t see, can barely feel, must sense
as we drift down the beach, are swept along.






Click here to listen to David Salner reading "Survival of the Sea Star"






David Salner’s second book, Working Here,was published by Minnesota State University’s Rooster Hill Press in 2010.His poetry has appeared in Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, The Iowa Review,  Atlanta Review, Witness, Pedestal, and several issues of Poetry Daily, and has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. Chapters from his novel about hard-rock miners in the Old West appear in Cottonwood Magazine and New Plains Review. He worked for twenty-five years as an iron ore miner, steelworker, machinist, and general laborer and lives in Frederick, MD, with his wife, Barbara Greenway.