Death of a Gull

Worse than his pain was his acceptance,
the wing loosely dragging beside him
while he did his best not to notice. As if the impossibility
might drop away, he ambled, a hen's shuffle
from oceanside toward the plovers' nesting ground,
but the little birds came diving, driving him back.
Beak open, he hissed like a swan, his only show.
Another gull glided down, just one — perhaps his mate —
companions side by side until he ignored
the cues for flight. She spiraled out of the path
of passersby, but he only turned his head away,
like a toddler's shy aside, to make the intruder disappear.

Day and night turned over, the waves
close then far. The weight dangling at his side
grew heavier and he learned to fix his eye
on the middle distance. Alone and offered up,
he roosted there, suffering the tide-rich sand
and the roving metal-throated birds
from which he once stole fish. The spewing waves,
the crabs awash, haphazard heads and claws,
offered nothing he wanted to eat.
The whole thing reeked. Overhead, the hypnotic
sequined blue glittered and teased.

The green sea went about its business,
sifting, hooking, grinding. Bottom waters
boiled and rose, feeding all the frenzied
multiplying cells, which brought the little fish,
the bigger fish, and then the seal,
whose lackadaisical tossing off of bones
made him the birds' life of the party.
The crippled gull heard them all, but as if
he lived in another country. There was nothing
but the square of sand he squatted on.
Flying was a prick of recognition gone foreign,
then a nagging absence, swallowed up by the wind.
Hour by hour, he became that emptiness,
just a breathing thing on the moving sand.
And then the line dividing the pulse
from the intake of air,
air ruffling feathers he no longer felt.

Cleopatra Mathis
White Sea
Sarabande Books

Copyright © 2005 by Cleopatra Mathis.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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