Beach Glass

@nataliefeddema

Beach Glass

Mr. Calava rises at five

A.M., the first on the beach, but not

Because he's crazy about the sea.

He's crazy about beach glass. He has

Two thousand pieces

At the latest count.

An industry of idleness,

He's a connoisseur of broken glass.

Sucked candy bits as hard as lava,

The shards are no longer sharp and come

In every shape and every color -

The commonest are white and brown;

Harder to find are blue and green;

Amber is rare; yellow rarer;

And red the rarest of all. The sea

Is a glassblower who blasts to bits

Coca-Cola and Waterford,

Venetian as well as Baccarat,

And has carefully combed its five-and-ten

For anything made of glass. It isn't

Fussy. It knows that everything

Will be pared down in the end:

Milk of magnesia bottles honed

To sky-blue icy filaments,

And smoky cordial bottles from

Brazil - sunglasses of an eclipse.

Mr. Calava's kaleidoscopes

Are kept in apothecary jars,

As if the sea were a pharmacy

Of lozenges and doled them out

Without a prescription, especially

For Mr. Calava, who firmly believes

The best things in life are free.

But what the sea has relinquished it

Has relinquished only in part. You know

How childish it is in it's irony.

The jigsaw puzzle is here. But then

Its missing pieces are still in the sea.

Not all the king's horses and all the king's men

Could ever put it together again,

Though - chip by chip,

And bit by bit -

Rouault could make a King of it.

Howard Moss

from "Beach Glass and Other Poems" edited by Paul Malloy


Mr. Calava. Who is this Mr. Calava? What kind of person gets up at 5am. to search the beach for seaglass? I like how this poem jumbles different stories together. First there is this collector and his dedicated search, then the story of the rareness of each colour of glass, and the sea as an artist, a glassblower who doesn't care about the quality or origin of it's material because, and this is my favorite line, "It knows that everything will be pared down in the end." I love that. Think about that awhile. It's so true. What does it matter the quality of my possessions ? What matters in the end is what was useful to me, what I actually did something with, what I took and turned into something more. And then there's the story of the sea as a pharmacy - that gets me too. For myself, and I know I must speak for so many, the sea has so many medicinal benefits - how could I even name them all?! And then, the story of the puzzle pieces forever scattered - I don't know if I feel sad about that, or happy. Is Mr. Calava slowly gathering these puzzle pieces  together again, or is he intent on putting them together in a new way? A new art from a scattered and broken original? What a thought. (Georges Rouault was a French artist whose painting "Old King" looks very much as if it could've been a mosaic of seaglass.) All these parts of stories jumbled together seem rather like the bits and chips of coloured seaglass collected in Mr. Calava's apothecary jars, don't they?