While she lives, abalone wants to stay sea-bound. Sedentary. Never leave home. Never lose sight of her familiar spot. Daily, abalone clings to her stony crevice in the seafloor. Might take a short creep. Stays at the bottom of the kelp forest. Looks up with her feeler-eyes. Marvels at the speed, the life of the amber kelp-fronds that grow as much as ten inches a day—fronds unfurling, billowing out, creasing and uncreasing, fronds that reach up, up, up toward the water-broken light. Sometimes it hurts to gaze at even this partial, diluted light. Sometimes abalone takes great interest in whatever is afoot. Sheepshead and opal eyes. Keyhole limpets, the wasting sea stars. Abalone is whorl-shell. Flat oval. Wide mouth with tentacles. Teeth on a ribbon. Series of breathing holes. Muscle-foot that clamps tight. Tarry, mull, root, fasten are abalone’s verbs for what the prophets might call a long abidance, a honing, a desiring of the one thing.

While he lives, urchin wants to charm and even dazzle those who brand him as invasive menace, disparage him as barren-maker, wants to be called with whimsy and fondness water thistle or button-fish or sea hedgehog, wants to lose his ugly French name that means beggar and brat. Urchin wants bull kelp and brown algae prepared for him in the presence of his otter and sea star enemies, wants to be led to blobs of overheated water. Urchin is purple spines. Sucking tube feet. Spherical shell. Lantern mouth that protrudes. Chisel-teeth that carve urchin-sized shelters in wave-battered granite. Urchin and his kind are fruitful, they multiply, they subdue. Eating everything, even calcified algae and sand, they overrun the kelp forest, chew its fronds to a militant lace, to last threads, to nubs. During heatwaves, during El Nino, urchins strip the kelp stalks, devour all the algae, leave the abalone nothing to eat. The sun is urchin’s bellicose god, o blinding eye, o daystar, o warmer of the seas.

When she dies, abalone wants to loosen her hold. And leave her familiar. And go to the beach, wash ashore there. Abalone wants the crabs and gulls to take and eat her flesh. Wants her shell to glitter in the sand, look up at sky, drink in unbroken light. Then to be carried further still. To be clasped in a hand, packed in a bucket. Placed at the edge of a garden path. Inlaid around a mandolin’s body. Mixed with pebble-dash. Taken to the sewing table of a Chumash woman who bends her gooseneck lamp, who stitches bits of shells into a lightning pattern on a dance belt.