Shark's Tooth

Joshua Mehigan

At twilight on the beach I found a shark's tooth. 

 After three days of looking, and then not, 

 I stepped onto the sand, and there it was. 

 It happened as I twisted loose a shoe, 

 impatient to shake off the week's bad luck, 

 and looked up to appraise（评价） the sky and sea. 

 There was no reason it should catch my eye. 

 Except for the western wall of one far building 

 turned by the setting sun the color of Mars, 

 everything I could see was shades of blue. 

 The tooth was small, what kind of shark uncertain. 

 But there it was, dangerous, big enough 

 in a place of such unfathomable（深不可测的） proportions 

 that I could seem, on balance, not much bigger. 

 It pointed at me from my open palm. 

 Was it an omen? The sky was getting darker. 

 I had been waiting patiently for something. 

 I held it in my hand, and I forgot it, 

 and dark-blue pelicans plied the dark-blue water, 

 where I could read the future of that sky. 

 A searchlight scanned the heavens and found the heavens. 

 The waves grew quiet. For a moment, foam 

 crackled like faraway applause. Red lights 

 blinked on the pier, which lay down lower beneath 

 a purple Asia of dissolving cloud. 

 The light grew eerier and eerier, 

 and, slowly, the horizon disappeared. 

Since then, I've found my way back every year, 

 and I have searched for hours, both day and night, 

 from when the first soul comes to stare and stand, 

 made taller by her reflection on the shore, 

 until the tranquil miles of cool sand lie 

 dimpled with shadows, twenty thousand footprints, 

 only disturbed by my feet shuffling toward 

 the yearly-more-immaculate parapet 

 of sea grapes slowly darkening. And often 

 I hold my shark's tooth like a sort of charm, 

 a talisman（护身符） to ward off superstition 

 and, through the one small stray coincidence, 

 bring sharply to my mind the thought of countless 

 coincidences that will never happen. 

 Each year, once more, I pass the place I found it. 

 I see it on the surface of the sand, 

 three or four paces from the wooden stairs, 

 where people made attentive by long views 

 pass by all day; where it had sat inside 

 the spreading shadow of a chirping dune 

 two minutes' walk at low tide from the water, 

 farther up than Poseidon normally rides; 

 where I might spend my life and never find one 

 poised on a peak between two child-sized footprints, 

 like a gift, or like bait, held out to me.