Brute Neighbors

"Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? Methinks I was nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I was near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life." – Thoreau, from Walden









October Gulls


Oh that flicker
of the white kite
that was the carousing gulls
out the back window
a handfull
filled the glass as if inside a frame;
for the midwest
has now become rain
by autumn,
the dampening of the rusted red
and the electric
fuchsias that once
carried along
in our childhood
memories of such season
has dampened
as if the tender
of a basement light
has lost the switch;
but the gulls
aflash,
who sweep down
the miniature
jet streams that ripple
the crust of the dark bay,
I did not know
they were as precise
of fishers
as the eagle or osprey;
I did not know
that the fry
might use this little
manmade plot
of the bay
for their incubation
and flop
as if silly lures
up over the surface,
brown bellies
gleaming as if a celebrative
offering
to gulls otherwise
waiting along the docks
the patience
that comes by the scavenger's
understanding
that the world is a meal
of you wait long enough.
The one
had dived down
far enough to lose its beak and eyes
for only a moment
to the charcoal water;
do you imagine
the eyes closed and the water
awoke some skeletal
symbol
from eons past?
Other gulls in the distance
had already plucked their share;
they had felt
the electric shock
of another kind,
a stern love of moving
to warmer air
for the season.
From space the clouds
look like puffs
of fisherman smoke.
There is blue everywhere.