Seagulls (Three Poems)

AT SEA

Gliding in from the ocean’s darkness,
a gull reflects by its wings 
the deck’s bright lights. 
It hangs motionless just above the ship,
just beyond my touch.

What does it seek?  Or is it waiting for something
as from its wings,
our light is directed back, 
as if from stars,
keeping track of a ship’s path, moving.

The gull moves too, but without a flicker of wing,
as if become 
an additional part of the ship,
or the ship’s reflection.
or, even, a new star in the heavens;

giving no direction
nor dictating nautical pace,
as if wondering what humans might do
on the sea at night,
if suddenly deprived of sight,

when in darkness there was nothing to see
but the foaming wake. 

            AT THE NEW HAVEN DUMP

When a seagull slants into New Haven
sideways in snow,
transcribing between the haze of a crooked elm
and 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 way and that--
seems fused in one purpose,
wings as if on struts, 
and bird seems in search of something:
we inevitably think garbage.

Seagulls in Hamden congregate in the city dump, 
foul dirty birds
besmirched with the soot of dump fires,
all streaked with gray
like the immature yearlings 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 indecent chatter.

I have heard birds abound with lice;
they certainly scavenge.
Gulls followed the ship from Germany day 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,
then broken like razors
to feed among crushed cartons on lettuce leaves,
on parings of apples, potatoes
and other waste forced 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 on 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 Cape Ann in a borrowed house,
how we waked to the bay sounds:
the slap on the seawall, the buoys and the creak of masts;
how blasts from a skipper’s horn struck as a bugle
arousing cries from an army of gulls:
the Black-backed, the Herring, the Laughing.
We lay in bed and listened
and thought across a continent to white Carmel,
to Monterey beaches, to Green-legged Californias
and understood: This bird and its various species
are symbols—for ocean, both oceans—the Atlantic and the Pacific,
and all there is between that is graceful and tawdry.
We got up to see a lobsterman hauling up traps
and breathed in the freshness: the cleanness, the sunrise, the sea salt,
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 claims the descendants: 
the Ring-billed and Franklin,
their eyes, as in other states, set on garbage,
crickets now hemmed-in by insecticides;
the gull sustained 
not by useful act merely, but by historical fact and tradition, 
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 now an angel above new disrupted snow;
above empty beer cans and garbage
and soot come down to mar what we thought of as beauty
now turned perverse.
We frown and curse as we slosh through flooded gutters
and are splashed by cars;

but curse not the gull, the triumphant, the radiant,
but ourselves and our one-way criteria;
our tastes informed by Currier-and-Ives,
Grandma Moses, and Audubon.

YOUNG GULLS

Though sparrow brown
and streaked by mud,
these birds are gulls.

Their raucous cries
discourage sleep.
Wings seem too long.

These birds
cannot grace a poem.
But you know they, too,

will one day fly
as radiant as angels,
haloed in the sun.