Your "draft" is like a breeze full of tumbling images, smooth polishing in the tumble. Here is what comes to me from this-- Too exquisite the awareness to let this flee from the poetic mind, and so much is suggested and set into memory. The idea that we become shadows-- on the beach as darkeness and high tide comes to grab the places we were-- yes. And the blackened fire--the earth (for me the adventures, activities of life, natural and created) that calls us) out of this timelessness-- and later the learning from the ebb and flow, the constant "how it is done" low and high tides...the sea flows into the fireplace--putting out the last embers--of that fire and of all the activities and living beings... elemental and inevitable. The last image (of pulling "the sea furthest") brings to mind friends standing on the shore facing the sea and imagining themselves pulling the waves up toward them as they splash up and quietly extend (I love watching this.) And some waves go further up-- one cannot know why! The birds that "fasten themselves" to the sea --makes sense to me--those flight-full creatures...seem stuck there, uncannily. It reminds me of my little brother's first sentence. We were in a car going by a resevoir and I can still hear his little voice say" "Daddy, why do the birds sit on the water???" It was a stunning first sentence I thought. Everyone had to stop and think, too!