Japanese for reverberations of a lingering memory. 

We were four women walking the beach after midnight,
our feet sinking in the cool sand, listening to the ocean expand

and recede in the dark. We’d flown to Florida to briefly escape 
our separate lives: one from her troubled marriage, 

another from the demands of children, the third still mourning 
a miscarriage, and the fourth, a different death.

We talked softly. Small holes in the sand burbled and spit. A ghost
crab skittered sideways like an arthritic hand running piano keys.

By moonlight we saw the reptilian body emerge, large as a manhole 
cover, dripping foam. A sea turtle come home to lay her eggs.

She labored, scraping toward sea grapes and grasses well above 
the tideline. We stood in a wide circle, waited like midwives

while the turtle swept sand behind her, dug a hole with her flippers. 
The work was hard. She strained her head forward, the folds 

of her neck stretched smooth, jaws opening. She gasped. 
Groaned. Heaved sand shoulder high, flinging left and right. 

Whumps from her rocking shell shuddered the ground. 
The sea smoothed onto the beach, shushed back to itself. 

She expelled the eggs beneath her and rested before ploughing 
sand into a crest over them with her flippers.

Like a shell pocketed from the beach, we each carried that night
differently when we returned to our lives—how the sea turtle

used her nose to anchor in, and drag herself by inches before melting 
into the water, the mound she abandoned large as a human grave.