"Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps / adjusting the ash heaps; / opening and shutting itself like // an / injured fan."
The mussel shells are afflicted, wounded. This one in particular adjusts the sand around itself but that sand is like an ash heap, suggesting burning and death. This line as well as others like "sea / of bodies," "spotlight swiftness," "dynamite grooves, burns, and / hatchet strokes" have led some critics to see the poem as a war poem, evoking battlefield destruction, death, and injury.
"The Fish // wade / through the black jade"
Moore purposefully blurs the boundary between title and poem, instantly plunging her reader into the depths of the poem, and, metaphorically, into the depths of the sea. There is no contemplation or pause before the immersion, merely a seamless segue into the sea. The reader is like one of the sea creatures now, but just like the fish in the murky sea they have to make their way through the opaque, turgid environment of the poem in search of shafts of illumination.
"Repeated / evidence has proved that it can live / on what can not revive / its youth"
This is a somewhat ambiguous end to the poem. Is the "it" the cliff, and what is it living on? Do both the sea and the cliff find that their youth cannot be revived? If so, that makes sense given the rest of the poem's acts of subtle violence and reference to death. On the other hand, there is still a sense of obdurate endurance, of resilience to their respective defiant and aggressive attacks.
