mussel hunter at rock harbor

• bir sylvia plath şiiri:
  
  i came before the water ---
  colorists came to get the
  good of the cape light that scours
  sand grit to sided crystal
  and buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls
  of the three fishing smacks beached
  on the bank of the river's
  
  backtracking tail. i'd come for
  free fish-bait: the blue mussels
  clumped like bulbs at the grassroot
  margin of the tidal pools.
  dawn tide stood dead low. i smelt
  mud stench, shell guts, gulls' leavings;
  heard a queer crusty scrabble
  
  cease, and i neared the silenced
  edge of a cratered pool-bed.
  the mussels hung dull blue and
  conspicuous, yet it seemed
  a sly world's hinges had swung
  shut against me. all held still.
  though i counted scant seconds,
  
  enough ages lapsed to win
  confidence of safe-conduct
  in the wary other world
  eyeing me. grass put forth claws,
  small mud knobs, nudged from under,
  displaced their domes as tiny
  knights might doff their casques. the crabs
  
  inched from their pygmy burrows
  and from the trench-dug mud, all camouflaged in mottled mail
  of browns and greens. each wore one
  claw swollen to a shield large
  as itself--no fiddler's arm
  grown gargantuan by trade,
  
  but grown grimly, and grimly
  borne, for a use beyond my
  guessing of it. sibilant
  mass-motived hordes, they sidled
  out in a converging stream
  toward the pool-mouth, perhaps to
  meet the thin and sluggish thread
  
  of sea retracing its tide-
  way up the river-basin.
  or to avoid me. they moved
  obliquely with a dry-wet
  sound, with a glittery wisp
  and trickle. could they feel mud
  pleasurable under claws
  
  as i could between bare toes?
  that question ended it--i
  stood shut out, for once, for all,
  puzzling the passage of their
  absolutely alien
  order as i might puzzle
  at the clear tail of halley's
  
  comet coolly giving my
  orbit the go-by, made known
  by a family name it
  knew nothing of. so the crabs
  went about their business, which
  wasn't fiddling, and i filled
  a big handkerchief with blue
  
  mussels. from what the crabs saw,
  if they could see, i was one
  two-legged mussel-picker.
  high on the airy thatching
  of the dense grasses i found
  the husk of a fiddler-crab,
  intact, strangely strayed above
  
  his world of mud--green color
  and innards bleached out blown off
  somewhere by much sun and wind;
  there was no telling if he'd
  died recluse of suicide
  or headstrong columbus crab.
  the crab-face, etched and set there,
  
  grimaced as skulls grimace: it
  had an oriental look,
  a samurai death mask done
  on a tiger tooth, less for
  art's sake than god's. far from sea ---
  where red-freckled crab-backs, claws
  and whole crabs, dead, their soggy
  
  bellies pallid and upturned,
  perform their shambling waltzes
  on the waves' dissolving turn
  and return, losing themselves
  bit by bit to their friendly
  element--this relic saved
  face, to face the bald-faced sun.