Is the body a shell?

A few days ago, on the dogs' morning walk along the harbor -- when I am mostly not awake -- I picked up a green crab's shell. Or a portion of one; the legs were gone. The body contained within the central carapace had become a sweetmeat for a gull. What was left was this patinated green husk about the size of a soda cracker, a tiny breastplate. It resembled, in fact, something retrieved from a sunken Greek or Roman ship, lost armor pulled from preservative Mediterranean brine.

The reason I put the shell in my pocket was the color of the interior, a startling Giotto blue, a sky from heaven or Arizona rinsed and shining. At home I left the fragment on top of the refrigerator; by afternoon the blue had faded to a kind of milky lacquer, a faintly skyey mother-of-pearl. By the next day it was a pale, iridescent opal. A lovely color, but far in power and register from that initial cerulean. Imagine living surrounded by that blue, bearing in one's own body the most brilliant wash of the summer firmament.

What color is the underside of our skin?

The fragment made me think of Rilke's archaic torso of Apollo, whose head "we cannot know" since it's long since gone; in the power and presence of the fragment a whole sense of spiritual life arises. Broken, the god speaks to us more clearly.

This morning I picked up a second crab. I do not know why this one died; there is no visible sign of damage. It is about the same size as the first. But this one's intact, centered on a white saucer on my desk. Are crabs subject to rigor mortis? If so, this one has only left this world just a little while ago. Move him in any way and the legs shift into a pleasing, vaguely Chinese pattern, the weight of the -- torso, is it? -- balanced by the two larger claws which reiterate, even in death, their message of menace and power.

It smells of seaweed and ruin.

I will not open this shell; I am less squeamish now about the tumbled mess of the flesh, but I'm no scientist. Yet there is something I love about placing this body next to the fragment of shell whose lavender interior reminds me of what was there: even in the smallest chamber, a sky.

-- Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast