(Having traveled down to Fire Island beach in New York
at the behest of Emerson, Henry David Thoreau writes
concerning the death of their mutual friend, the
transcendentalist and foreign correspondent Margaret Fuller.)

--July 27, 1850--

What news can I offer? This shift of Margaret's,
pieces of patterned cloth and silk fringes,
one shoe, a carpet-bag. My scavenger's harvest
washed ashore from the Elizabeth. No manuscripts,
no fervent letters home. Only a calm sea
where last week waves cast first her child,
then her husband into the roaring my own ears
echo. The sandbar, the ship breaking up.
Lifeboats torn loose in the storm's fury.
Impatient with disaster's slow coming--
from dawn till noon--Margaret refused to abandon
hope a tug might rescue all she carried back
from her life in Rome. Her passion,
her new freedom in the revolutionary years,
frenzied crowds who celebrated the Republic--
now lost as the violently pitching forecastle,
where she'd come for shelter, swayed,
then folded underneath her. Vandals
who poured onto the beach to watch,
carried off clothing, a broken desk,
a black leather trunk, some unimportant papers.
Hearing that pilferers had gone to Patchogue,
I engaged three fishermen to take me there
by oyster boat. We waited for tides to release us.
By then, two lay drunk, soaked in bilge water,
wallowing in their own vomit. The skipper
steered us through darkness, heavy mist,
towards the safety of a lighthouse.
Almost ran us aground, before discovering
it was instead light shinning through a crack
in another fisherman's bunk not six rods off.
We found no sign of Margaret, no stolen diaries.
What did they care for my troubles or what
I recover, salvaging for myself some respite
from this animal rage? My despair?
I've been to her child's grave, heard
how the steward carried him. How both were
swept into a great crest. Two souls
freed by the surf. At Concord, I once
conceived in my walking, in my devotions,
a home-made divinity of our earth:
mind and heart united in the arcadia I write of.
Walking here has given me---peace, renewal?
Yesterday, I learned one more body had washed up,
badly mangled by sharks. Bones with a little
flesh adhering. I buried these myself,
as if it were Margaret. I dug into the earth's
loam-rich cadences with my shovel.
Marked this place whose beauty I couldn't
define: bunch grass, weathered rail fences.
Wind: cold, hollow. Exhausted, I gave thanks
for this unclaimed button, brass half-globe
I found, believing it Margaret's.
This talisman, prayer bead I cupped,
hands wedged deep inside my coat pockets.