Hagstone

On the beach we all have a knack for something.
My son in law skips stones six leaps across a thinning surf.
My husband harbors inner heat despite the wind.
With ease I find black stones with holes clear through
where witches live, my daughter says, and laughs.
Her gifted ears are fine tuned to tumbling staffs
of waves crashing in multi-phonic whispers and roars.
Harmonics hum along this stretch of sand, lost on me.
My ever gulping pupils ignore my poor ears, grow 
lost in mirages of hands and feet burning in the campfire,
wood mimicking bone, an archeology of grain 
that striates everything, as though the whole
earth were breathing inside a set of giant, fractal ribs
spinning out the endless chests of gulls, men, fish,
metastasized hotels, pretty cages glowing along 
the coast like mammoth corpses or gum-receded teeth. 
Red logs remind me how many degrees my bones
will reach on the path to ash, ash my family may choose
to suspend in blown glass, spun globes to place on desks
as paperweights, or shelves as funerary art or shrines
beneath thangkas of Tapihritsa where I may serve
as a reminder, a gutted clock. Perched on a mirror base, 
plugged in, LED lit, five alternating colored lights 
shining through what’s left of me, a tiny spiral galaxy— 
starry crumbs of my body glowing in vitreous space 
like Tibetan thigles—to everyone’s surprise I will be 
not quite a comfort, not quite discomfiting.