Gulls
Their urgent calls scrape like rusty hinges
yet also screech like keening or jeering
to us reclining in greased near nakedness
yet oddly without desire as black shadows
ripple swiftly across our sandy blankets
like shades of spectral crosses once wavered
before bonfires of books and heretics.
Regard that one-legged yellow-eyed bird
who regards us from that diffident distance
instinct prescribes. Note how Satan’s blood-
red spot marks his yellow beak. He desires
our sandwiches, but if we bobbed half-dead
in swells and troughs amidst a lazy swirl
of sharks he’d be stripping sun-cooked faces.
We watch them boil behind a far trawler’s
rooster wake like swarming gnats. Sailing aslant
in twos they mew against wind that lofts them
and their boomerang wings elbowed askew
reminds one of us almost too old to sunburn
how a glassy eye glimmered from halved seagull
crushed in a crinoline hat halfway through
a rummaged attic chest. Faded insouciance
lit by a bare bulb’s mustard glow in airless heat.
yet also screech like keening or jeering
to us reclining in greased near nakedness
yet oddly without desire as black shadows
ripple swiftly across our sandy blankets
like shades of spectral crosses once wavered
before bonfires of books and heretics.
Regard that one-legged yellow-eyed bird
who regards us from that diffident distance
instinct prescribes. Note how Satan’s blood-
red spot marks his yellow beak. He desires
our sandwiches, but if we bobbed half-dead
in swells and troughs amidst a lazy swirl
of sharks he’d be stripping sun-cooked faces.
We watch them boil behind a far trawler’s
rooster wake like swarming gnats. Sailing aslant
in twos they mew against wind that lofts them
and their boomerang wings elbowed askew
reminds one of us almost too old to sunburn
how a glassy eye glimmered from halved seagull
crushed in a crinoline hat halfway through
a rummaged attic chest. Faded insouciance
lit by a bare bulb’s mustard glow in airless heat.
