The unassuming
 Piddock clam
 Hidden from view
 Eight years or more burrowing
 12 degrees forward
 Shell rasping against rock
 Then 12 again
 30 times until the circling drill
 Of its own self
 Turns complete —
 Again and again.
 
 On the cobbled beach
 Tide-filled, summer camp children-filled
 Moving like sanderlings escaping the waves
 Florescent lime t-shirts 
 So they are all easily in view
 I scramble 
 Over glinty metamorphics
 Some larger than
 Suitcases
 Fallen from the leaning, torn-open
 Conglomerate cliffs
 To find each 
 holy rock
 Each curiously carved and hollowed
  Remnant of these clams’
 Industry.
 
 Grey sandstone their substrate
 Cylindrical passages carved as if 
 by auger and  bit
 Many parallel, not overlapping
 Partially or all the way through.
 
 Surf-rounded
 Some small as pendants
 To wear round the neck, ready
 For its cord or chain
 For years I have passed them by
 Never guessing 
 Them artifacts of undersea molluskan
 Conurbations.
 
 What cities 
 unknown and unremarked
 Lie all about us
 We urban sophisticates with our 
 surf toys and magic wheeled vehicles
 Think only of ourselves
 While much older are the city builders
 Under wave
 Atlantians that need no Plato
 To tell their tale
 A million years and more
 Chiseling out the boulevards and avenues.
 
 And what of the ants
 The birds
 The corals and mangroves
 All diligent in their complexity
 With no recourse to our war, famine or fame
 And I say
 We city people
 Are so much younger
 And still have so much to learn.
 

 5 August 2019
 Beneath the Dana Point Headlands
 Approaching high tide

* The Pacific Rough Piddock Clam, Zirfaea pilsbryi, ranging from Siberia to Mexico, during its eight year life “never completely ceases digging its burrow.” https://inverts.wallawalla.edu/Mollusca/Bivalvia/Myoida/Pholadidae/Zirfaea_pilsbryi.html