The sign on this case proclaims

this carefully preserved specimen
to be “beach” or “false heather,”
the name, of course, bringing you
to mind, and how you were always 
lying and now you are always
everywhere, underfoot as a ghost
in this sand, and ahead of me
my mother takes a stick and whacks
some fish bones along the shore
and into the lake and the Longest
Johns “plot a course to the night,”
and the dead fish says “their smiles
below say I don’t owe them my life”
and waterlogged petals drift down
to the bottom of the benthic abyss.