Seagull II

When a seagull slants into New Haven
sideways in snow,
transcribing between the haze of a crooked elm
the rectangular shadows of buildings
an oblique arc;
when phantom descends and glides
near the top of the shorter trees,
the pear and magnolia, the rattling ailanthus,
and all but the angling head--
this wat and that--
seems fused in one purpose
the wings on struts,
and bird seems in search of something,
we invariably guess garbage.


Seagulls in Hamden congregate in the city dump,
foul dirty birds
besmirched with the soot of dump fires,
all streaked like the immature yearling or two-year brood.
They sluggishly move apart before the cars
borne down in mud by their burdens:
collected refuse of kitchen and cellar,
of curb and yard, little worth eating;
and if they fly, then a few short feet,
never beyond the point where eye can see
the bright orange spot on the lower mandible,
and set up in decent chatter.

I have heard birds abound with lice;
they certainly scavenge.
Gulls followed the ship from Germany days on days,
most prominent when boilings within our wake
threw up the foul stench of offal the ship had belched.


I could see them settle, their wings in archangel stance
and then broken like razors
to feed among broken cartons on lettuce leaves,
on parings of apples, potatoes
and other waste washed out from the kitchen.
It seemed, as they dropped astern
as if angels fell. I would think of their graceful maneuvers 
above and across the ship in the drafts set up by its passing,
how late at night a gull would sweep in from the blackness
its wings alight with our light, 
but flickering, unearthly.


Now I think of our days at Cap\e Ann in a borrowed house,
how we waked to the bat sounds:
the slap at the seawall, the buoys, the creak of masts:
how blasts from a skipper’s horn seemed a bugle
arousing cries from an army of gulls:
the Black-backed, the Herring, the Laughing.
We lay in bed listening 
and thought across a continent to white Carmel,
to Monterey beaches, to Green-legged Californias,
and understood. This bird and its species
in symbol—for ocean, both oceans—the Atlantic and Pacific—
and all between that is graceful and tawdry.
We got up to see
a lobsterman in his dinghy hauling up traps
and breathed in this freshness, this cleanness, the sunrise, the seasalt,
and fell back to our touchstone: gull…
a bird become monument.

The Seagull Monument stands in Temple Square, Salt Lake City,
this side of Nevada deserts,
that side of the Rocky Mountains and Kansas plains,
a reminder of timely migration 
or divine act
benefitting pressed Mormons,
ambiguous,


while out at the edge of the city,
the city dump has claimed the descendants,
the Ring-billed and Franklins,
their eyes, as in other states, for garbage,
crockets now hemmed-in by insecticides,
the gull sustained not by useful act, but by law
for tradition, for memory, retained for religion’s sake.


Here in New Haven the first warm day after snow
a gull flies over,
haloed in inner-wing-feathers and rim of tail,
a cross-shape illumined,
released from necessitous ways,
flying an angel above now disrupted snow;
above the beer cans and garbage;
the soot come down to mar what we thought of beauty
and turned perverse.
We frown and curse as we slosh through the flooded gutters
and are splattered by traffic;
but curse not the gull, 
the triumphant, the radiant
but our-selves and our one-way criteria,
our tastes informed by Currier-and-Ives,
Grandma Moses, and Audubon.