Consider the Gull

Consider the Gull

I wake with my hand held over the place of grief in my body.

“Depend on nothing,” the voice advises...

                                                                                Jane Hirshfield

                                                                                One Sand Grain Among the Others in Winter Wind

It’s boats I know nothing of though the cast off

is so much like the sound a knitter does

in their head when things they’re counting on in the dim

light of an after supper evening begin failing.  I know

somewhere back in my blood a grand or greatgrand

father of my grandmother’s fell from the crow’s nest

and was never again and I imagine the men on deck going about

the ropes and the nets and almost not

knowing and seeing a peripheral flash and thinking

gull and its close to the banks and don’t we

have to cast off near to,  hear that? and not

until its too late do they think to consider the gull

was a man falling from the sky like Icarus only

without his wings.

Those boats I watch all summer tethered

or tendered going out into the sun and coming back

after the traps are reset are solid enough

for me but only when they’re pulled up on the lawn

the way my father’s is moored in front of the living

room window.  She takes on the water

of winter like Grace O’Maley.  Queen, she was

all I’d ever want to be in a self who wasn’t

afraid of the water.  And honestly, listen, I’m not

afraid of it: graceful as she is at her most

charming and seductive, she’s more than I know going in

I could never be saved from, and no one

would ever know to look up from their work

to watch me fall or know I’d needed saving

after all.  And if Indian Red were the last color I saw

or knew, on the tip of the gull’s beak, if it got close enough for me

to see before I went beneath the one boat

and then all the rest one by one bobbing on the bay

waiting just waiting in all their paint and patched decay

I’d say is it enough? it would have to be enough.